Looking at Claire Rosen's photographs can feel like walking into someone else's dreams. One of her images shows a young girl about to be dragged into the sky by a pack of flying toy horses. Another series shows horses, hedgehogs, cockatoos and camels posed before different sumptuous feasts, as if having their own last suppers.

"I have a very sort of whimsical, surreal, view of the world that is deeply rooted in magic and fairy tales," Rosen says. She couples that worldview with a deep appreciation for classical painting.

The award-winning photographer mines fairy tales, and the strange beauty of the natural world. Her work, she says, serves as a vehicle, "to have this sense of adventure and exploration in the world, and to be able to learn things, and see new places, and meet interesting people."

Rosen explores the creative process in her new book Imaginarium — it's filled with inspiring quotations, practical advice, resources and required reading, as well as thoughtful meditations on the methods of making art.

Interview Highlights

On realizing how much of her inspiration came from images she saw in childhood

That was a big revelation for me. ... I looked back at the things I was doing in my childhood, and the things that I cared about then ... really imprinted this aesthetic on me that is carried through my work. For example, I spent a lot of time at the Museum of Natural History when I was little in New York, and my mom jokes that I would cry when we had to leave because I wanted to crawl into the dioramas with the animals and stay there. We would go to The Met frequently and I would get lost in those paintings.

Even recently — I thought I was very original with my animal feasts project — and I dug up a bunch of my childhood books and there are all these wonderful children's illustrations of animals eating dinner, and having parties, and carrying on in anthropomorphic ways. And I thought: I'm not being particularly original — I saw this when I was 5 years old. That's been very interesting to connect those dots.

On carving out space for creativity

I think that it's amazing if you can take control of curating the input of your life. ... I think it's very easy to get sucked into a very busy, monotonous work life, and when you get home and you want to unwind, all you want to do is sit down and watch Netflix. But I think [one should try] to fight that — to actively curate your life so that you are having interesting experiences in the world.

On seeking out creative activities

I don't know that it has to be the sort of traditional formula of going to a museum. Maybe you take up archery. Maybe you are doing pottery but you're really a banker. Maybe you're going to see a talk on a field that has nothing to do with what you do. Or traveling. But [the important thing is] that you are seeking out experiences outside of your comfort zone, that you are experimenting and exploring and figuring out what it is that you actually like. You may come across something that you never knew you were interested in.

Radio producer Ravenna Koenig, radio editor Jordana Hochman and web producer Beth Novey contributed to this report.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

On the surface, this photo looks fun, but it is staged. And its origins highlight the cloudy intersection of wildlife photography, animal welfare issues and photojournalism integrity. Photo by Riau Images/Barcroft Images/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Take a look at the photo above. It looks whimsical, or so thought some at the NewsHour last Thursday, when it was posted as part of our Photo of the Day series. But soon after, members of the science desk raised their suspicions about the photo.

It seemed lucky for the photographer to capture such an odd behavior in nature. Too lucky … Plus, the picture was reminiscent of a viral photo from 2015, involving a frog “riding” a beetle. That photo had been discredited as staged, and people accused the photographers of animal cruelty.

So like a Sherlock-Holmes-meets-Dorothea-Lange, I dug into whether or not the frog-riding-turtle photo was legit. What we found highlights the cloudy intersection of wildlife photography, animal welfare issues and journalistic integrity of photography in an age of digital consumption.

NewsHour sourced the photograph from Getty Images, via the company’s “editorial” listings. Editorial photos are journalistic, meaning the image should capture news events, nature and other phenomenon in an unaltered state. That’s opposed to Getty’s “creative” listings, which encompass photos that are valuable for illustrating concepts or for advertising, but are typically manipulated, creatively lit or staged. Think stock photos like “woman laughing alone while eating salad.”

Our photo in question displayed an Australian green tree frog — or “dumpy frog” — riding on a sulcata tortoise. It was taken in West Sumatra, Indonesia. Neither of those animals are native to this region.

Getty licensed the image from Barcroft Media, which in turn got it from Riau Images, an Indonesian photo agency. Barcroft told Newshour that the image metadata never indicated whether it was staged or not.

The photographer, Yan Hidayat, told Newshour in a translated email interview that he had purchased the animals in Jakarta as pets and then staged the image. He has a number of posed photos featured on Getty Images. He explained that all of the animals in his portfolio are bought from a pet store, except for the snails, which he found in his garden. When the juvenile pet-store frogs and turtles grow up, he releases them.

Hidayat said that Riau Images had never inquired into how he took the photos.

In case you’re wondering, frogs don’t normally ride tortoises, according to a representative for Society for the Study of Reptiles and Amphibians who spoke with NewsHour — which may have been what subconsciously triggered our BS detectors in the first place.

A Wallace’s Flying Frog sits in an unnatural way with a snail on its head. Wallace’s Flying Frogs are not native to Padang, the area where this photograph was taken. The same photographer behind the staged photo at the top of the story — Yan Hidayat — captured this one too. Photo by Riau Images/Barcroft Images/Barcroft Media via Getty Images)

Hidayat is hardly the sole peddler in the cottage industry of staged frog photos. When we searched “frog” in the “news” section of Getty on March 23, 2017, the first page returned 46 photos of frogs. All of the well-lit and professional photos on that webpage came from Indonesia. None were native to the area in which they were photographed. Fifteen of those 46 photos featured frogs that had been stacked on other animals — turtles, snails and other frogs — or vice versa, as if someone was hosting a menagerie-style rodeo.

When we inquired about the photo, Getty provided this statement: “Whilst we do have an editorial policy and robust measures in place to ensure our content ingestion process upholds these standards, we recognize that in this case the image was incorrectly assigned as editorial. We are working with Barcroft to conduct a review of their full collection in order to affirm they are appropriately labelled and assigned.”

Newshour removed the image and replaced it with the caption “ The photo has been removed from this post, because it may have been staged and may have resulted in cruelty to the animals involved.”

A cruel stage in the digital world

Though the genre of documenting animals in implausible positions has garnered internet acclaim, some accuse the photographers of animal cruelty. One post on the Chinese forum Weibo attempted to tackle how many macro animal photos from Indonesia might have been staged and involve animal cruelty. The user points out unnatural poses, non-native animals and inconsistencies with the captions. (The critique is translated here.)

While several animal photos on Getty are clearly staged — many from Hidayat — animal cruelty is difficult to confirm with a single snapshot.

Some artists use taxidermy in their photography to create life-like positions. For example, Simen Johan’s photo series “Until the Kingdom Comes” involves some live animals, some taxidermied, some frozen and many digitally altered. The gallery describes his work as “intricate digital constructs.”

But the killing and mounting of animals for photography isn’t a widespread habit, said Chris Palmer, the director of the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at American University, who co-wrote guidelines for ethical wildlife filmmaking.

A red-eyed green frog (Agalychnis callidryases) photographed at the Montibelli private wildlife reserve, in the municipality of Ticuantepe. This photograph does not show signs of staging, as the frog is native to Nicaragua and sitting inside a leave is normal behavior. Photo by INTI OCON/AFP/Getty Images

Taxidermy takes time, resources and expertise, and then you’re typically stuck with a single, fixed pose. You would never get a photo series of a turtle walking across the water if it was dead. Plus, taxidermy frogs hardly look alive.

Palmer has never seen a photographer killing and stuffing an animal just for a photo. And while it may happen somewhere in the world, “to do all that to take a picture would be kind of like using a sword to cut butter. It would be overkill,” he said.

However, Palmer believes posing animals for photography is unethical, even if the animals are alive.

“There are two angles to this,” he said. “I think one is the effect on the animals. Are they being harassed? Are they being mistreated?”

The other issue is normalizing the manipulation of animals.

“It’s not ok, they don’t want to be picked up, they don’t want to be moved and put here and put there. And we need a more caring, more ethical approach to animal photography,” Palmer said.

Journalistic integrity is also at stake. The North American Nature Photography Association guidelines encourage animal photographers to provide image captions that describe whether or not the photo is natural. Someone seeing or sharing a staged photos may think that it presents natural behavior for the animals, which falls into the arena of “fake news,” Palmer continued.

However, Hidayat didn’t try to suggest that his photos were accurately documenting nature.

“Sorry, this has been a mistake,” he explained in an email. “I never explained how the photographs were taken. The blame is on me, and I hope this is a lesson for me to learn.”

The post When whimsical wildlife photography isn’t what it seems appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Earlier this winter, photographer Michael Furtman was driving along the North Shore of Lake Superior in search of great gray owls. Several of the giant, elusive birds had flown down from Canada looking for food.

He pulled off on a dirt road where he had seen an owl the night before. An owl was there, perched in a spruce tree, but a pair of videographers were filming it.

"I backed off; I was going to just let them have their time with the bird," Furtman says. "And then I saw them run out and put a mouse on the snow."

Predictably, the hungry owl dove, in front of the camera, snatching an easy meal. Furtman says he was so angry that he got in his car and drove away. But he soon returned to confront them and filmed the encounter on his phone. He later posted the video on Facebook.

"There are a lot of people who would like to photograph this bird hunting," he said to the videographers through his car window. "And it's not going to hunt the rest of the day after you stuff it to the gills."

One responded saying, "We understand ... but we're not hurting this bird in any way, shape or form. Absolutely not. Maybe we're hurting the photographers, and I'm sorry if that's the way people feel."

Those opposed to feeding say it's unethical and doesn't capture owls behaving naturally. Furtman has made it his mission to fight the practice, confronting people and outing them when they post baited photographs online.

James Duncan, a Canadian biologist and an owl expert who directs Manitoba's wildlife and fisheries branch, says the main concern is it can habituate owls to humans.

"You're essentially training the owl to lose its fear of humans and associate food with humans, so then they become bolder," Duncan says.

He says this bolder behavior can increase the chances of the owls getting hit by cars.

Others say there's a lack of evidence showing that owls are being harmed by these staged, human interactions.

"It's a nasty battle, but as far as I know, there's no data to back up any of the negative," says Terry Crayne, a longtime hobby wildlife photographer in northern Minnesota.

Crayne admits he uses mice to entice owls for his photos.

"Most of the people I know who are against feeding owls are actually feeding deer," Crayne says. "The deer are associating humans with food. So which is worse? In my mind, if you're against feeding one animal, you should be against feeding them all."

Photographers in Minnesota say they began to see widespread owl feeding about a dozen years ago. Furtman says he even tried it, but quickly soured on the practice. Still, it worked.

"I mean I have to admit, it's really cool to watch an owl fly in and grab something," Furtman says. "How often do you get to see a predator pounce on prey?"

Advances in digital cameras have attracted a lot more people into wildlife photography. And that has increased the conflicts around owl feeding.

Several magazines and photo contests now reject baited shots of owls and other predators, including National Wildlife magazine, where Lisa Moore is editorial director.

"It's unnatural behavior and it devalues the hard work of ethical wildlife photographers who are out there taking the time in the field to wait for that shot," Moore says.

She says her magazine's goal is to feature ethical, authentic photos — not of wildlife in a game farm, or lured with bait.

Dan Krakercovers northeastern Minnesota for Minnesota Public Radio. You can follow him@dankraker.

Copyright 2017 Minnesota Public Radio. To see more, visit Minnesota Public Radio.

Watch Video

The post How photographer Platon gets up close to capture a person’s truth appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Before we headed out on our latest road trip for the Our Land series, we put a call out on social media, asking for ideas of places we should go in Arizona and New Mexico. Shannon Miller's suggestion really caught our attention: "White Sands are the only white gypsum 'sand' dunes in the world. They are actually crystals and it is beautiful."

How could we resist?

There's really no place like it on the planet: White Sands National Monument in southern New Mexico. It's the world's largest gypsum dunefield, miles and miles of stunning white landscape.

Here are some things to know:

1. "Beautiful" — Shannon Miller's description — is an understatement. The landscape is spectacular and otherworldly. "It's like you're in another planet," as park ranger Eugene Ibarra tells us. "The only thing that reminds you that you're still in planet Earth is that the sky is blue."

2. Most of the New Mexico dunefield actually lies outside the boundaries of the park. White Sands National Monument is dwarfed by the White Sands Missile Range, a military testing area for the U.S. Army, and most of the dunefield lies within that missile range. The world's first atomic bomb was detonated at the Trinity test site in the missile range, just 65 miles north of this park, on July 16, 1945. Several weeks later, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

3. They're not exactly the "only" white gypsum sand dunes in the world, but pretty close. The New Mexico dunes cover a vast area: 275 square miles. The next biggest gypsum dunefield is in Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas. Total dunefield area: about 3 square miles.

4. The dunes are made of the soft mineral gypsum, laid down 250 million years ago when the southwestern U.S. was covered by the Permian Sea. Later, that seabed was pushed up into the mountains that ring the basin that surrounds the area. Rainfall dissolves those deposits, carrying the gypsum down and replenishing these sand dunes, which shift constantly with the winds.

5. Even when the sun is broiling hot, the sand stays cool under your bare feet. That's because the sand is made of gypsum crystals.

6. There are signs warning that there's no water available beyond the visitor center, but it's easy to forget just how unforgiving this park can be — because it's so beautiful. And people have died here. Just two summers ago, a mother and a father didn't bring enough water on their hike, and died along the Alkali Flat trail. Their 9-year-old son survived.

7. Because White Sands National Monument is right next to White Sands Missile Range, the park occasionally shuts down during missile testing. The park service also warns visitors to avoid anything that looks like unexploded ordnance. Another neighbor is Holloman Air Force Base. Three years ago, an unmanned drone aircraft from Holloman crashed inside the park, spilling jet fuel and scattering debris. Cleanup and environmental remediation has been slow; that part of the park is still off limits to visitors.

8. Park rangers lead daily sunset strolls through the dunes. Once the sun goes down, the sand gets pretty chilly underfoot. With a permit, you can also go horseback riding through the dunes. It's purely BYOH.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

SURVIVOR— Antonius Wiriadjaja was struck by a random bullet as he walked down a crowded Brooklyn street in 2013. The intended target was the ex-girlfriend of the shooter. Credit: From SHOT: 101 Survivors of Gun Violence in America by Kathy Shorr, published by powerHouse Books.

The post This is what gun violence looks like, for those who survive appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

What will our dinners look like when temperatures and sea levels rise and water floods our coastal towns and cities?

Allie Wist, 29, an associate art director at Saveur magazine, attempts to answer that question in her latest art project, "Flooded." It's a fictional photo essay (based on real scientific data) about a dinner party menu at a time when climate change has significantly altered our diets.

Wist has been following news about climate change with a growing sense of urgency. Global temperatures have risen in recent decades and extreme weather – droughts, floods, hurricanes – is more common. Sea levels are rising, causing coastal erosion and flooding and even the disappearance of small islands in the South Pacific. Our oceans are becoming more acidic from dissolved carbon dioxde, hurting marine life. And, in some parts of the world, farmers are struggling with unpredictable growing seasons.

Climate change has "become this future vision that's right in front of us," Wist says.

But the issue is a politicized one in the United States, she says. Many people don't believe climate change is real. And many find it difficult to understand, because it's too abstract.

"I felt this need to subversively convince people," Wist says. "I wanted to hook them more emotionally, with something they can relate to."

So she chose food. "It is so integral to how we see ourselves and how we live every day," she says.

Climate change is already having an effect on food production. In 2011, a study in Science found a small, but measurable decline in the world's wheat and corn production. As global temperatures rise, some places will become more favorable for agriculture, while many others will become too hot and dry to grow crops. Extreme weather will also influence food prices, as we saw in 2010-2011, when drought in some parts of the world and unusually big cyclones and floods in others led to a spike in wheat prices. Warmer ocean temperatures have and will continue to affect fisheries.

All this means we might be forced to change what we eat in the coming decades, says Wist. People "have to start to realize that their daily activities could change, will change, because of this thing that they consider abstract," she says.

Wist and her team, fellow photographer Heami Lee, food stylist C.C. Buckley and prop stylist Rebecca Bartoshesy, started out by making a list of foods that scientists think "are either threatened by climate change or would be more available in an era of climate change," she says. They chose to anchor the essay in New York and New England to think more specifically about the kinds of food and eating habits that would have to change.

Rising sea levels put coastal cities like New York, where Wist now lives, at a greater risk of flooding. That means in the not-too-distant future, residents might have to turn more to the ocean for food, says Wist.

So her fictional menu includes an array of foods harvested from the sea.

Bivalves, for example, play a key role in protecting the ocean environment, by filtering out pollutants. But they are threatened by climate change– the increasing acidity of ocean waters is eroding their shells. If we can save bivalves, they could become a good source of food in the future, Wist suggests.

Wist says they chose mustard greens to serve alongside the bivalves on her menu because the hardy plants "can survive volatility in climate."

And Wist thought about what might be in our glasses as well as on our plates.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, rising sea levels are likely to contaminate ground water. "I don't think anyone thinks about it, that we might have to desalinate ocean water in order to have drinking water," says Wist.

Some countries, especially in the Middle East, already desalinate ocean water to provide more fresh water to their citizens, but Wist envisions the use of an at-home method involving a bowl, a rock and plastic wrap.

When it gets too hot or dry to grow crops, we could turn to mushrooms for food, too, suggests Wist. They grow in all sorts of environments and can even detoxify soil.

The picture on the right above, depicting a pudding made with carob and an algae-derived gelatin called agar-agar, is one of Wist's favorites. It forces viewers to "acknowledge that chocolate's being replaced," she says. It's a reality cocoa farmers in West Africa are already facing.

"West Africa is thought to rise by about two degrees in the next 100 years," says Wist. "It will be too hot, too dry for cocoa production." And carob, which is less vulnerable to climate change, may be a good substitute.

Another major ingredient in these recipes is seaweed. A recent study has suggested that seaweed farming could be a good source of nutrition, as well as help mitigate climate change.

"Seaweed can absorb five times as much CO2 as land plants," says Wist. "I was really inspired by that research and thought what if someone did that? What if we started farming this more earnestly?"

"Part of this [essay] is dystopic," says Wist. "Because we're losing all these things, and that's bad." But part of it is utopic, too, she says, because it shows how human creativity can help us find alternative sources of food.

You can see Wist's entire essay and some creative recipes for the dishes above on her website.

Rhitu Chatterjee is an editor with @NPRFood. You can follow heron Twitter.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

In California, an extremely wet winter put an end to the state's record-breaking drought. Heavy rainfall also produced welcome spring scenes — like replenished reservoirs and fields in bloom.

"It's a completely different look," says Justin Sullivan, a Getty Images photographer who took before-and-after style photos of drought-stricken areas. "It's just like a velvety green, lush landscape now — compared to just dry, brown, almost like a moonscape before."

Sullivan's photos show how one of the wettest winters on record is bringing the land back to life. In early 2014, Sullivan documented the drought at its worst. He shot photos from a helicopter above reservoirs like Lake Oroville.

"It's a little surprising to see the recessed water in reservoirs that reveals banks that are 50, 60, 100 feet tall," he says on NPR's Morning Edition. "They look like little mini-mountains and then a little river running through them."

Fast-forward to this spring.

Earlier this month, California Gov. Jerry Brown declared an end to the state's drought emergency. Now, many of those desolate landscapes Sullivan captured look completely different. So he went back and tried to re-create the same shots.

"We just wanted to show the contrast," he says, adding that it was a tricky assignment. "Obviously, landscapes change over the course of three years. Trees grow bigger. So it was difficult to just remember in your mind exactly what lens you used and how you approached it."

Sullivan downloaded the 2014 images onto his iPad and brought it with him when he shot the "after" photos. In trying to re-create the exact same frame, Sullivan had some luck on his side.

In one side-by-side set of photos, the 2014 version shows a man walking his dog. The man is surrounded by dead grass, with the San Francisco skyline in the background. When Sullivan returned to the (now green, grassy) hillside this year, he was able to snap a photo of a woman walking another dog in almost the exact same spot.

"Sometimes they just work out perfectly," he says.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

On April 28, the magazine LensCulture posted a photo of what appeared to be a man raping a girl who looks like a young teenager.

The magazine — which has nearly a million Facebook followers — was using the photo to promote a competition in partnership with Magnum Photos, which cost $60 to enter 10 photos. "Don't miss out!" the post said, a few sentences above the photo.

The caption said the girl is 16 and is being forced to have sexual interactions with a "client" in the red-light district of Kolkata, called Sonagachi.

The girl is on her back, looking up at the camera, with a naked man on top of her. Her face is in full view. Her identity is not concealed.

Based on the content of the photo and its caption, the photo violated UNICEF's ethical guidelines on reporting on children by showing her face, which makes her identifiable, according to human rights activists.

The agency writes: "Always change the name and obscure the visual identity of any child who is identified as a victim of sexual abuse or exploitation."

The photo infuriated human rights activists and photojournalists.

"I've seen some moral bankruptcy in photojournalism, but this is the most extreme," says Benjamin Chesterton at Duckrabbit, a film production and training company, who first wrote about the photo. "This is a photo of a child sex slave being used to promote a for-profit competition by Magnum — the most prestigious photo agency in the world."

The incident also brings attention to a broader issue in photojournalism, Chesterton says: How the Western media depicts — and often demeans — young women and girls in poor countries.

"This is the elephant in the room: how we view the suffering of distant others," says human rights activist Robert Godden of Rights Exposure, which helps nonprofits and governments create effective and ethical campaigns. "What if this photo series was taken in the U.S. or the U.K. — would the girl have been presented this way?"

He adds, "Another good question to ask is: If this was a family member of mine, would I want them portrayed like this?"

Amid a barrage of protests from readers, photojournalists and human rights activists, LensCulture took down the photo hours after it was posted.

"But at this point, the magazine said nothing," Chesterton says. "There was no statement, no acknowledgment of the absolute human rights abuse of that young woman, of that child."

Two days after the image first went up, LensCulture issued an apology on Facebook for making a "serious mistake in judgment" in presenting the photo "out of context."

But the magazine defended the photo and its photographer, Souvid Datta:

We'd like to emphasize that we believe the work of the photographer was carried out with great ethical care and in close collaboration with the subject portrayed; by contrast, our own posting was hasty and presented the situation without proper context.

Datta did not respond to NPR's email request for an interview.

Within a few days of the controversy's start, the validity and ethics of some of Datta's other work came under fire.

Datta has been a highly regarded photojournalist since starting his career in 2013. He has won several prestigious awards, including ones from Getty Images and Magnum Photos. And his work has appeared in The New York Times and National Geographic.

On Thursday, Datta admitted to Time to doctoring images. The photo of the girl led to a closer look at Datta's other work, which led to accusations of plagiarism.

He admitted to taking a portion of a photo from influential photographer Mary Ellen Mark and inserting it into his own work without attributing it to her. He also admitted to taking other people's photographs and submitting them in photo competitions.

At that point, LensCulture changed its view. On Thursday, May 4, the magazine's CEO Kamran Mohsenin told NPR that they no longer believed the photo was "taken with great ethical care."

"Clearly that picture, in particular, is not appropriate in any context," Kamran says.

Shortly after LensCulture spoke with NPR, the magazine issued a new apology on Facebook:

"We condemn the lack of ethical standards used to create the photograph in question, and we apologize for publishing the photograph (which should never be published anywhere)."

Renowned photojournalist Donna Ferrato agrees that the photo is not appropriate in any context.

"There's no editorial value at all to this image. It's sensational, and it's incredibly damaging to the victim," says Ferrato, who did groundbreaking work documenting domestic violence in the U.S.

"When I first saw the photo used in the ad by LensCulture, I was really devastated," she says. "It disgusted me that there are two men in the room with this young girl. There's the 'client,' paying to have sex with her. And behind the client, stands the photographer, who has been paid, through grant money, to take photographs of the girl being used.

"All this photo says is, 'We men are in power, and we can do anything we want. The photographer can do anything he wants,' " Ferrato adds.

Last week, Datta, the photographer, posted a comment about the photo and the controversy to his Facebook page, which has been taken down.

In the statement, he said he was "horrified" that the photo was used to promote a competition. And the girl in the photo "is now an adult and has given her consent to use her photo."

Datta also defended the image of the girl:

She asked me to photograph this interaction — fully aware of my intention to publish this story widely in an attempt to create constructive awareness ... Where some see the image and point to the anonymity of the client and apparently undignified exposure of an underage girl, I see the astounding resilience of a young woman who takes ownership of her reality — unlawful, deplorable and bleak though it is — and determines to be more than what her circumstances have forced upon her. I see a woman who wants to speak directly to viewers, saying if you actually want to understand my perspective "then look into my eyes and see what I feel."

Human rights activist Godden doesn't agree with Datta's choice of showing the girl's face in the photo. He says that shocking photos such as this one aren't helping girls in Sonagachi, trapped as child sex slaves.

"Protection of children is always top priority," Godden says. "If this photo was exposing a practice that was unknown or hidden, then you could possibly justify exposing a child's identity to document what's happening."

Such an exception was made recently with child and adult slavery issues in the fishing industry in Southeast Asia and construction in the Middle East, Godden says.

Another example is Nick Ut's iconic war photo, showing a 9-year-old girl, naked, running away from a napalm attack in Vietnam. Historians credit that photo with changing the public's opinion about the war.

In the case of child slaves in Sonagachi, Godden says, the problem has been well known to activists and governmental officials for years.

"Human rights activists have been working on this issue for decades," he says. "Awareness is not the problem, in my opinion. Now it's about technical support to these girls and countering corruption in those country. It's not about shocking photos."

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Plastic surgery, private jets, toddlers in designer clothes, magnums of champagne — Lauren Greenfield's 500-page photo collection,Generation Wealth, shows all of that. But this book isn't just about people who are wealthy, it's about people who want to be wealthy.

I met up with Greenfield at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, where there's an exhibit to accompany the new book. She says some of her early work was photographing kids here in LA, where she grew up. This project, about wealth and striving for wealth, developed from there, even though she didn't know it was about that at the time.

"I started it as a kind of looking back at the culture I grew up in," she says. "And then I went on to do other things, about gender, about fashion, about consumerism, about how our values have been exported. It wasn't until the 2008 financial crash I realized that the stories that I'd been doing for a couple of decades were all connected, and kind of formed a morality tale."

So Greenfield went back through her old work to see "how the pieces of the puzzle fit together." She also identified what was missing, and began filling in the holes to see "what it all added up to."

It added up to a massive collection of images. It's organized into sections with titles like: "I Shop Therefore I Am" and "The Princess Brand." It's in chronological order, and at the exhibit we start in the early 1990s, with images of private school kids, seventh graders, each flashing a $100 bill.

If you're doing a story about growing up in LA, the kids told Greenfield, you have to show money. Then there's the photo of high school kids who've skipped school to cruise the beach in their convertibles. But, she says, these kids actually aren't rich.

"The thing about this project is: It's not about the rich, it's really about our aspiration to wealth, and our needing to show it off whether we have it or not," she explains. "So, with the rich kids, I was looking at how they were growing up quickly, and how they were influenced by the values of Hollywood. But they were really influenced by the media, and MTV and ... hip-hop culture for inspiration. So then I also photographed kids from East LA and South LA who, on the other side, were emulating the trappings of wealth."

It's like a feedback loop, she says. The rich kids want to look like the poor kids, and the poor kids want to look like the rich kids. We look at another picture of a kid in a pin-striped suit and rose boutonniere, paying for a limo outside his prom date's house.

"Enrique was living in South Central, his mother was a seamstress, and he spent two years saving the $600 that he spent on prom," Greenfield says. "His mother thought money could go to better use, but she knew how important it was to him, and he said it was completely worth it. They had a limo, it picked them up in South Central, everybody was looking, and he said he 'felt like the king that day.' I think it's really important to understand that these values go beyond the rich, they go beyond the poor. They cross class and race and even border."

There's a section in the exhibit called "The Queen of Versailles," about a wealthy couple that builds a huge mansion, and another section called "Cult of Celebrity," with early images of the Kardashians. Greenfield has captured famous people learning how to be famous.

"Fame has been an important driver in the work ..." Greenfield explains. "With the rise of reality TV and social media, everybody can be a celebrity and fame has currency. And so, in a lot of my interviews, when you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up they say: rich and famous."

People will also pay to have the trappings of wealth — there's a "fake it 'till you make it" mentality. In the images — of lavish pool parties and the like — it looks like people are having fun ... but are they happy?

To answer that question, Greenfield quotes David Siegel, from the Queen of Versailles, who said, "Money doesn't make you happy. It just makes you unhappy in a better section of town."

"There's a striving that kind of continues among rich," Greenfield says. "The Queen of Versailles was a perfect example — they lived in a 26,000-square-foot house and then built a 90,000-square-foot house. ... There's kind of a theme of addiction and the addiction of consumerism. And so with addiction, you never have enough and there's no satisfaction and eventually you hit rock bottom."

Which brings us to a section called "The Fall," in which Greenfield captures the damage done by the 2008 economic crash. The pictures are different here: There are no pool parties; this is wealth pursued and taken away — people who reached up and discovered they reached too far. Her images depict a GM worker who lost his job and ended up in foreclosure; a real estate agent who became a phone sex operator; an empty home where a child's trophies were all left in the garage.

Finally, there's a section called "Make it Rain" — where dollar bills float down as naked women crawl on the floor to pick them up at a famous strip club in Atlanta. In another image, a T-shirt simply states: "Being broke is not an option."

Greenfield says, now, decades after she started taking these pictures, projecting wealth is more important than ever.

"I think the backdrop of these 25 years is that we've never had more inequality and we've never had less social mobility," she says. "So, in a way, fictitious social mobility — bling and presentation — has replaced real social mobility ... because it's all you can get."

Greenfield believes there's been a shift in values — from "hard work, and thrift, and frugality and modesty" to "bling and showing off and narcissism."

Materialism, she says, is the new spirituality.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

In 1624, as Portuguese colonists were making their way through the east coast of Africa, a woman named Nzinga ascended to the throne of Ndongo (now Angola). She spent decades fighting off invaders, both from Portugal and neighboring African kingdoms, and became a legend among her people and around the world.

Nzinga is one of the first people that Mikael Owunna, a Pittsburgh-born Nigerian-American photographer, thinks of when people tell him that queerness is un-African. "The thing about Nzinga is her title was Ngola, and Ngola means king," Owunna said. "Nzinga ruled dressed in full male clothing as a king, and she had a harem of young men dressed as women who were her wives. So in the 1600s, you basically had a butch queen with a bunch of drag queens for wives leading a fight against European colonization."

Finding historical representations of queerness in Africa is important to Owunna because growing up he was flooded with messages that his sexuality and cultural heritage were at odds. "When I read that history, I understood really kind of fundamentally that Africans, we have been here. We've been at the forefront. And even when you read about the way gender and sexuality are talked about, it's not just one way. Every different community has a different way to understand gender and sexuality."

When Owunna was unwillingly outed to his family at 15, the solution to what some family members perceived as a problem was to send him from his hometown of Pittsburgh to his parents' native Nigeria to reconnect with his roots. "Because the idea was if I get re-exposed to my culture, there's no way that I would be this way," Owunna said. "This is an American thing. This is because I grew up in America." For several years, Owunna traveled to his family's hometown in Nigeria twice a year. But when he was eighteen, he said through laughter, "They found out that I was still gay."

The winter after he started college, Owunna was sent to Nigeria again. This time, he was put through what he described as a series of exorcisms to try and change his sexuality. A healer poured hot oil all over his body in an attempt to drive out whatever was making Owunna gay. "In that context, I felt like I couldn't be Nigerian and queer, because I was put through so much trauma and abuse," Owunna said. "I ran away from everything Nigerian, everything African for years."

But eventually, Owunna started to question the idea that he couldn't be both queer and African. His current project, Limit(less), pushes back against the belief that being queer is at odds with being African by interviewing and photographing people who embody both identities. Most of his subjects so far live in the United States and Canada, with origins from Somalia to Morocco to Cameroon.

Owunna said that working on this project has been a way to link his experience to a larger community. Almost everyone he has interviewed processed similar messages growing up. "They'd heard that [being queer] is un-African. That it is not of our culture. It's a Western thing, it's a disease from white people. All of these kind of really crazy things that have been taught to us through colonization over centuries."

The perception that queerness is un-African has been reinforced legally in some countries. According to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), same-sex sexual acts are illegal in 33 African countries, and punishable by death in Sudan and parts of Nigeria. Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has been quoted as saying that homosexuality could potentially "disturb the African moral fabric."

State-sponsored discrimination against LGBTQ individuals became widespread with British colonialism. A Washington Post investigation revealed:

"The idea that the so-called tolerance towards homosexuality somehow sprang from a western source doesn't hold...Looking at a variety of data on 185 countries, we found that former British colonies are much more likely to have laws that criminalize homosexual conduct than former colonies of other European powers, or than other states in general. For example, 57 percent of states with such a law have a British colonial origin. Almost 70 percent of states with a British colonial origin continue to criminalize homosexual conduct."

Working in the United States and Canada, Owunna and the people he photographs have had the ability to be fairly open about their sexuality and identities. In several of their countries-of-origin, the same wouldn't be true. Nigeria, for example, is one of seven African countries with a law on the books that "target[s] freedom of expression related to sexual orientation."

Owunna said during interviews with his subjects many described experiencing trauma, hurt or alienation. The lives of the people he works with are complicated, he said. But he has a different vision when he photographs them. "Despite all of these circumstances, we still are whole individuals and can live full and free lives," he said. "What I really specifically try to do with my work is envision what a free world for black, queer, and trans people can look like. So with every click of my camera, I'm trying to capture this sort of emancipatory vision."

His subjects style themselves, and he likes to shoot them in or near their homes. Some of the people Owunna shoots are comfortable in front of the camera. Others are shy. To help get a sense of who they are and what they want to convey, he often spends a full day with each person before taking a single shot.

After one memorable shoot, Owunna passed his camera to a woman he was profiling so she could take a look. She was silent for a long time, and then explained to Owunna what she saw in his work. "She'd been telling herself that her goal was to be a certain type of person in five or seven years," he said. "But looking at the photos, she could see that she was already that person that she was envisioning and dreaming to be. She was that person today. That's when I realized I was capturing something special and magical."

In June, Owunna will bring Limit(less) to Europe, where there are about four times as many African immigrants as in the United States. He wants to explore issues that LGBT African refugees are facing. And he wants to continue to push the boundaries of what it means, and what it looks like to be queer and African today.

"Because Africa has like a billion people," Owunna said. "It's ridiculous that we try to homogenize it. But it comes from colonialism, where the West, Europeans, saw the black body as this mass, this homogenous mass... And so we've internalized that to be like, 'Oh this is not African. This is not us.' Whereas being African has always been about abundance and about richness. It's been about possibility."

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

For 15 years, documentary photographer Stephanie Sinclair has focused her camera on what she calls "everyday brutality" — the violence, genital mutilation and forced marriage endured by girls and young women around the world, including in Afghanistan, India and Nigeria.

Now she has won the Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award, granted by the International Women's Media Foundation and named in memory of the Pulitzer Prize-winning German war photographer killed in Afghanistan in 2014. We spoke to Sinclair, who was born in Miami and lives in upstate New York, about her award, her photos and videos of the travails of child brides around the world, and about recently becoming a mother herself. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The awards jury cited the "intellectual and emotional courage required to continue to bear witness to scenes of despair." How would you define courage in the context of photography?

Courage is relative. I don't profess to have Anja's courage in relentlessly documenting the horrors on the front lines throughout the world. She passed away in the process of trying to tell the stories of some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

I was more interested in the intimate stories near the front lines. I kept seeing girls who were marrying so young and struggling in very immediate ways — from domestic violence, cyclical poverty, being more prone to HIV, having higher [medical] risks in childbirth — and I thought that deserves as much attention as any conflict zone. The real courage belongs to the girls for enduring such trauma and sharing their stories, which they do because they don't want to see these things happen to others.

When did you begin your series of photos and videos exploring child marriage, "Too Young to Wed"?

Though I did not realize it at the time, it was when I was in Afghanistan in 2003 and I [had an assignment] about girls self-immolating, setting themselves on fire. I met Marzia when she was 15. She had set herself on fire because, she told me, she had broken her husband's television set. Now you don't do something as extreme as this very painful suicide attempt except out of fear [of her husband].

When I met her she was still in the hospital, in a lot of pain from her burns, and I learned that she was married when she was nine. I had heard about child marriage but had not realized it was still being practiced, even with pre-pubescent children. Since then, I have covered child marriage in more than ten countries.

One of those countries is Nepal, where you made a film featured at the Through a Woman's Eyes Film Festival in April. Can you tell us about that?

It was made in 2016 and is called "Nepal: A Fragile State," about a couple in Nepal, a child bride and groom, Durga and Niruta, whose wedding I attended and photographed on a previous trip to Nepal about ten years ago. At that time, she was 14 and he was 16. I had learned that after the earthquake in 2015 Durga and Niruta's village had been decimated, and I wanted to re-visit.

They now have three kids.

Durga does not want his daughters to marry young. Does that suggest attitudes toward child marriage are changing?

I would say that many families have told me that they don't want their children to marry young. But when you don't have enough food to feed your children, when an emergency [like an earthquake] happens, families have to weigh what's worse, possible starvation or a child marriage so the daughter has a home and food? When that happens, then poverty becomes cyclical. Because they married so young Durga and Niruta did not have the education to make different decisions about their future. They are then not able to withstand the [aftermath of the] earthquake. There are no other opportunities for income other than agriculture.

Statistics show that child marriage usually increases in emergency settings. The challenges these families face are very layered and nuanced. It's not just the immediate consequences but lifelong consequences that the next generation has to face, particularly the girls.

As part of your "Too Young to Wed" series, you've made six videos.

Films are definitely a lot more work. Post-production work is very time-consuming, to go through it all in a nuanced way. But actually hearing the voices of the girls and young women is special, and I think the films provide a bit more depth because you can see them moving, see their body language--more so than in a still.

Each medium has its strengths and they work in a complementary way.

For the videos I am the director, and sometimes I co-direct with someone else and I am the executive producer. But I don't do the camera work because I'm doing the interviews and the stills.

Congratulations on your family news! When did you become a parent?

My husband and I adopted two children from China two-and-a-half months ago. They are 3 and 7, and they have albinism and are both legally blind. But they are healthy and wonderful and are giving us the very common exasperating but very loving experience of being new parents.

What's next for you?

I have an exhibition in June in Paris that I have been preparing. It will include a selection from all of the portfolios and all of the videos. But no travels until then.

Diane Cole writes for many publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Jewish Week, and is book columnist for The Psychotherapy Networker. She is the author of the memoir After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges. Her website is dianejcole.com.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

They're seemingly unavoidable on Instagram these days: photos of bright yellow egg yolks nestled in a fluffy bed of egg whites, like the sun framed by billowy clouds. They're called cloud eggs, and they're pretty enough to look like a taste of heaven ... which is probably why people are obsessively whipping them up and sharing their pictures on social media.

Yet the latest food fad du jour is actually a modern spin on a nearly 400-year-old recipe.

"They are basically a very, very old dish. It's essentially something called Eggs in Snow, which the French have been making for centuries. And it's suddenly taking off on Instagram," says Daniel Gritzer, the culinary director at Serious Eats.

He points to a recipe for Oeufs à la Neige (eggs in snow), in Le Cuisinier François, a seminal cookbook published in 1651, just as France was beginning a revolution in cookery that would make it the culinary leader of the world for centuries.

Modern cloud eggs are simple to make, but look sophisticated. Recipes vary, but basically, you take an egg, separate the whites and yolk, beat the whites into a stiff foam and season to taste. Then you scoop the foam into a cloud-like form on a baking sheet covered with parchment, leaving a hollow in the middle for the yolk, and pop it into the oven. In some versions, the yolk goes into the oven at the same time as the whites; in others, the whites bake first for a few minutes, then the yolk is added and the whole thing is baked for a couple of minutes longer. Baking times vary, but recipes generally call for around 5 to 6 minutes total.

The 17th century version was cooked a bit differently: Instead of hand-mixers or whisks, chefs used bundles of finely split sticks. The egg foam and yolk were placed on a buttered dish and baked atop of coals instead of in an oven. The whole thing was heated from above with a cooking tool called a salamander – basically, a hot fire shovel held over the dish. (Think of it as a 1600s version of a butane kitchen torch or a form of controlled broiling.) It was served with a sprinkle of sugar. These days, the name "eggs in snow" (or "snow eggs") denotes a different dish: a dessert made of meringue poached in sweetened milk and served with a custard. (It's a French classic, and was a favorite of famed food writer Craig Claiborne.) But the snow eggs described in that 1651 recipe were essentially the same thing as cloud eggs, agrees Paula Marcoux, a food historian who specializes in re-creating recipes using period cooking techniques.

Like today's cloud eggs, Marcoux says, the 17th century recipe was likely a novelty dish meant to impress. "It's just one of those things rich people did for amusement ... kind of like today."

And chefs of the era were also beginning to unravel the mysteries of cooking science. "Seventeenthcentury people are figuring out how proteins work – it's the very earliest phases of what becomes fine French cooking," says Marcoux.

Nowadays, chefs know that when you beat an egg white, you're actually participating in a cool bit of biochemistry. Egg whites are mostly liquid, but they're full of proteins. When beaten, those proteins unfold and bind with each other, creating a structure.

"They start to arrange themselves into a network, like a net, as they bond to each other and stretch out," explains Gritzer. That structure traps the air introduced through beating, and also holds the water in egg whites in place. The result is foam.

It's a touch of kitchen magic that has fascinated cooks for centuries.

"Even in 19th-century America, people were excited," says Marcoux. And later, "in the 1950s, people were crazy about making meringue pies. It's almost something home cooks tap into as a show-offy kind of thing. We see that happening in generation after generation of home cooks."

In my home kitchen, I gave cloud eggs a whirl. On their own, they're pretty but bland. But a dash of salt and pepper, a dusting of Sunny Paris spice blend (purple shallots, chives, dill weed, basil and peppercorn, among other things) and a generous sprinkling of grated sharp cheddar, all folded into the foam before baking, fixed things nicely.

As for cloud eggs' 17th century counterpart? That was surprisingly scrumptious, says Marcoux. My queries had piqued her curiosity, so she tackled the 1651 recipe using historically accurate tools — salamander and all. She'd been skeptical beforehand, but "it was as delicious as it was silly!" she reported back.

So if you should encounter cloud eggs in the wilds of the Internet, instead of asking yourself, as The Washington Postdid recently, "Uh, why is this a thing?" just know the answer is: Because we are human and there is little new under the sun — not even cloud eggs.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

There is a whole range of feelings that happen with the delivery of bad news. In my case, like many others, knees lock, the heart speeds up and the hairs on my arms get a funny little tingle. My circumstances, however, were a little less expected.

When my dad told my husband and me that he and my mom wanted to come into Manhattan for dinner, I was excited to see them and quickly made a plan for an 8 p.m. dinner at Café Orlin — my favorite for Middle Eastern food. As soon as we sat down, I knew something was very wrong.

My mom had been in and out of breast cancer treatment for 15 years and had been managing and treating the disease like it was no big deal, even though she was just in her 50s. Were they about to tell us that the other shoe had dropped and she was dying? No, this time it was about my dad. He had stage 4 pancreatic cancer. My 28-year-old world shook. We all knew what this meant.

As a photojournalist, I did the only thing I knew: I picked up my camera and documented my parents' dual cancer treatments for the next 24 months and our lives as they unfolded. From the seven-hour chemotherapy infusions to running errands with Mom according to her to-do lists, I was there with my camera slung across my shoulder.

When I look back on the time I spent documenting these complicated months, I don't immediately remember feeling scared. I remember the pee-your-pants laughter, high-calorie dinners (as per the doctor's request, of course), the late-night dance parties in my parents' kitchen and the never-ending conversations over a cup of Chappaqua roast from Susan Lawrence Gourmet Foods and Bea's Bakery blueberry pie.

Everyone deals with their fears, especially death, in their own way. My family leaned on humor to carry us through this difficult time. I remember one night sitting on my parents' bathroom floor as my father began to cut off my mother's hair, which had become flat dreadlocks tightly knotted against her scalp. The chemo had stopped its growth, but she hadn't been ready to part with her hair for the third time — once with each cancer diagnosis. I remember cursing the universe, asking it to give my mom a break just this once. The next thing I knew, my mother jumped in front of me and my lens, discarded hair held to her face like eyebrows. A fashion show followed suit, as we all wore her hair as costume, including the dog! That she found the lightness and ability to find joy in this moment speaks to the tremendous woman she was.

By confronting what I feared most, using my camera as my shield, I was able to move past the trauma that I anticipated and truly enjoy the time we had left together. Had I hidden away from the reality, I wouldn't have the beautiful photo of my parents holding hands across the chemo chairs as they received their respective treatments. They were the definition of strength and courage, and seeing these images reinforces to me the importance of not letting fear hold me back. It also reminds me to appreciate each day and not lose perspective. As Mom once told me, "There's also life going on here. I am having marshmallows, you know!"

Was it scary? Of course. When he died in 2013, my dad, Howie, was 58. My mom, Laurel, was 59 when she died one day shy of the anniversary of my dad's death. But what was most notable was how those final months were filled with love and life.

Although my parents are gone, my siblings and I continue to feel their love and guidance, as we sift through decades of found letters and notes, including one small stack of Post-it notes from our mother, exemplifying the importance of leaning into fear and taking chances: Courage isn't the absence of fear — it's knowing that you are afraid and doing it anyway. Don't spend your days avoiding risk, being fearful. Act. Live your life on your own terms. Life is precious; spend it without regrets in your own precious voice. For my three angels: If you want to talk or feel my love, look up at the night sky — I am always watching over you.

Nancy Borowick is a photojournalist based on the island of Guam. She has covered humanitarian stories for many organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. Her book documenting her parents' life with cancer, The Family Imprint: A Daughter's Portrait of Love and Loss, is now available, and the work will be on exhibit beginning Friday in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Photography documents life — and food, whether in the fore or background, seems to always be in the picture. The two intersect in a new book, Feast for the Eyes, written by photography curator Susan Bright and published by Aperture.

The way that food has been photographed over the years is a reflection on the times we live in. The first still-life like images of overflowing fruit baskets soon branched out into ways of commercializing food. As photography evolved, food was sometimes used to make statements during important moments in history, such the Great Depression or the fight for civil rights.

And sometimes, food is just photographed as art for its own sake.

Today, we want food to look real. In the past few decades, food photos have taken on a real-time documentary feel, from a chef captured mid-flambe to a scoop of ice cream that has just begun to melt.

Though the style of photography has changed over the decades, the images in a Feast for the Eyes show that our relationship with food has always gone beyond the merely edible— whether it's humorous, artistic or political.

All of the following images, which are in the book, represent the ways in which food has appeared in photography through the ages. Each tells us something about ourselves, our values, and the world of food that we live in.

Until the 1910s, commercial food photography was largely black and white. Early on, the only color photographs were made through the use of pigments and dyes. The first true color photo was created by French physicist Gabriel Lippman (who earned a Nobel Prize in physics for his invention), though even his process was too slow to be of use for commercial photography. Ultimately, color photography sprang from the idea that all color could be reduced to red, blue, and green. By the 1910s, photographers finally had a working way to create color photographs in the field (or in the kitchen).

Since food is such a central part of so many social gatherings, it's no surprise that many photographers began documenting how people ate along with how they lived. This photograph by Russell Lee was taken for the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration, part of a New Deal program that resulted in iconic images of life in America from 1935 to 1944.

Food has long been a favorite topic for government propaganda. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union commissioned two books cataloguing the country's modern and efficient food industry. During World War II, Nazi Germany papered its citizens with propaganda convincing them to be happy on a diet of poor-quality meat and potatoes. Meanwhile, the Farm Security Administration repurposed many of its photos to create a video called "Today's Storage is Tomorrow's Dinner." It's goal was to educate the public on how to preserve, can and grow as much of their own foods as possible.

In the 1950s, the fictitious Betty Crocker spawned an iconic food brand. According to Feast for the Eyes, the brand "offered an exuberance and spirit which opposed the penny-pinching, storing-and-preserving relationship to food of the New Deal and wartime eras." Many brides received the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook as a wedding gift. The Technicolor photos and lavish spreads it featured remained a popular style of food photography for years to come.

Cutting-edge photographers used food as a medium to showcase new technology like stop-motion photography. The photographer, Harold Edgerton, was a professor of electrical engineering at MIT when he took this image of a milk drop suspended in air. Feast for the Eyes notes that the "legacy and influence of these photographs cannot be underestimated; variations on them can be seen regularly in advertising, and even in films such as The Matrix."

Over the years food photography has been used for political-artistic purposes: to question the expanse of our industrial food system, challenge gender norms or comment on aspects of consumer culture. Chris Maggio's "Male Chef" series fits into the latter category. It "indirectly mocks healthy living and food blogs and the values to which they aspire," writes Susan Bright. This photo is from his Thanksgiving series, which includes images such as spray bottles filled with blue cheese dressing and turkey gravy or a Powerade-drenched turkey. Male Chef attempts to satirize the food porn seen on television and Instagram. The spreads he presents are almost decadent — overflowing with cheese, meats or sugar — but the combinations (as well as presentation) make them feel like a craving gone terribly wrong.

There's been a burst of creativity and experimentalism in food photography, thanks to independent journals like Gather or the now-defunct magazine Lucky Peach. They've showcased some of the most creative ways to photograph and style food, like this jello disco dance floor, or a series of edible images of Trump and his cabinet members crafted from tortillas, smoked fish and roe, and produce. "This is not food you want to eat," writes Bright. "Instead, the food here seduces the viewer in another way altogether."

Tove Danovich is a journalist based in Portland, Ore.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Conservation photographer Paul Nicklen has spent more than two decades documenting the ice and wildlife in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth — the Arctic and the Antarctic.

It's a risky business: Nicklen often finds himself immersed in frigid waters, just a camera's length away from deadly predators. Once, in Antarctica, he came face-to-face with a 1,000-pound leopard seal: "She opened up her mouth and her head is twice as big as a grizzly bear, and I am starring down her throat," he says.

Nicklen adds that his utmost concern is for the well-being of the animals he encounters. "I want to get close, but I also never want to harass an animal," he says. "What you learn about these animals is how communicative they are, how intelligent they are, how social they are, how forgiving they are."

Interview Highlights

On how he's come to ignore his gut in dangerous situations

When it comes to working with these big predators ... your, sort of, innate fear mechanisms are telling you not to do it. So you're always ignoring your gut. And when you ignore your gut all the time, at some point you don't know where that benchmark is anymore. ... You're always stepping into this gray area and you're stepping over the line, and so now I've learned ... when my gut's really screaming at me, to slow down and be smart. I start to back up a little bit and just spend more quality time analyzing, thinking, watching and then ... moving on with it if it seems like the right decision. ...

I think I get so caught up in how important these stories are and how my images have to have that three-dimensional feel to them, to really bring people into the issues I care about, and I think I just get so focused sometimes on getting those images.

On not being afraid of dying doing his work

I'm not really scared of death, I just want my death to be cool, and I guess being speared by a narwhal would be a pretty cool way to go. ... I think if I'm out there pushing and trying to push the limits to come back with something amazing to connect the world to what I love, then sure.

On a memorable interaction with a leopard seal

This leopard seal stayed with me for four days straight. And every time I would show up on the water, she'd be there to greet me. She would follow me back to the sailboat at night. Once she established her dominance, she completely relaxed, and then she disappeared and I thought the encounter was over.

Then she showed up a few minutes later with a penguin in her mouth. She had just caught a penguin chick — she was holding it by the feet — and the penguin is flapping, trying to get away from her. And she would sort of line it up with me, and when it was lined up perfectly with me she would let it go, and it would swim off, she caught it, she did this over and over.

And I realized at that moment that she was trying to feed me a live penguin. And I think she realized quickly in this encounter that I was not capable of catching a live, moving, swimming penguin, and so she brought me another penguin. She did all these different attempts to feed me live penguins. And at one point ... there's a photo of her looking dejected, sort of disappointed in me that I'm so useless that I'm unable to catch or accept one of her gifts, so then she started to bring me dead penguins, and at one point I had five penguins floating around my head. ...

Further on in the encounter ... she got so tired of me being unable to accept one of her penguins that she grabbed it and she flipped it on top of my head.

On falling in love with the leopard seal

I definitely fell in love with this seal. It's embarrassing to admit this to you. ... I'd fall asleep at night with tears coming down my cheeks. ... I was just so grateful, just to spend your life out with animals and to be fighting to get yourself into a situation where you can try and get close, where you can try and even get within 100 meters of something.

And all of a sudden here's a top predator, and not only are you getting to see it, it's interacting with you; it's trying to force-feed you penguins, it's trying to take care of you. It's a very very humbling thing. ... Just to flop yourself into its world and for it to spend that much time and energy trying to figure out who you are and to interact with you. ... I think that's why I get emotional, because we had such a connection.

On what happens to the polar bears when the sea ice melts

In the last 20 years, to have the scientists talking about how we're reaching the lowest extent of ice we've ever had, a place like Svalbard, Norway historically has been covered by sea ice year-round. In the last 20 to 30 years that ice has been just in a few fjords, and then now in the last few years there's been no ice at all around Svalbard. There's been a little strip down on the east side.

And when there's no ice that means bears basically do not have that platform to catch seals, and that's their main food source. They might eat a little bit of seaweed ... they might get the odd bird egg or the odd bird, but that's not giving them any nutritional value.

Essentially, bears are designed to go on land for long periods of time. They can be on land for two months and not eat a meal. But they're not designed to go four or five or six months on land without eating any food, and that's where we're starting to find emaciated bears, dead bears. ...

I've never had a scary moment with a polar bear, and people come to me like, "Isn't that the only animal that actively pursues humans for food?" And I just see this powerful, but very fragile, vulnerable species that is so at the mercy of its ecosystem. And it's sort of the one species that I really use to drive home that connection to how important this icy ecosystem is. I want people to realize that ice is like the soil in the garden — without ice the polar regions cannot exist.

Radio producers Amy Salit and Thea Chaloner and Web producers Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey contributed to this story.

Copyright 2017 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh Air.

Last year, German historian Harriet Scharnberg released a paper showing that, during and immediately preceding World War II, the Associated Press engaged in a photo exchange with the SS, serving as a pipeline for photos from Nazi Germany to American news outlets and providing the Nazis photos which they used in internal propaganda. Last month, the AP released a detailed report of its own, countering some of Scharnberg’s claims, copping to others, and contextualizing its actions.

Brooke speaks with journalist and former AP correspondent Matti Friedman, who recently wrote a piece for Tablet called “What the AP's Collaboration With the Nazis Should Teach Us About Reporting the News.” They talk about the actions the AP took, how the ethical and reporting questions that the photo service faced during WWII persist today and whether highly censored information is sometimes worse than no information at all.

Then, Brooke speaks with John Daniszewski, Vice President and Editor-at-Large for Standards at the Associated Press, who oversaw and edited the AP’s internal report regarding their Nazi entanglements. He argues that, while the substance of Scharnberg’s paper is correct, the mission to report the news justified many of the agency's actions.

Mikael Owunna grew up in Pittsburgh not knowing many other LGBTQ Africans like him.

The Nigerian-Swedish American photographer said like many of the people he interviews and photographs, he often heard growing up that being LGBTQ was caused by overexposure to Western culture and that it was not traditionally African, “despite the fact that people we would now identify as ‘LGBTQ’ have existed in African communities since precolonial times,” he says. Owunna’s new documentary photography project, “Limit(less),” sets out to debunk the myth that being LGBTQ is “un-African.”

The project, which began more than three years ago, explores how LGBTQ African immigrants in USA, Canada, Sweden and the Caribbean use fashion to bridge the gap between their dual identities. At the moment, he’s featured more than two dozen of those immigrants on his website.

Colonization, as well as an an influx of Western pastors and preachers, left much of Africa with “violent homophobic and transphobic sentiments,” Owunna said. While there has been a considerable amount of work around discovering Western-driven homophobia within Africa, there are fewer studies on African members of the LGBTQ community who have left the continent. Owunna believes that through fashion, LGBTQ Africans are visually deconstructing the idea of what it means to be both African and a member of the LGBTQ community. He hopes that his project will “add to this body of work and connect the dots between the experiences of LGBTQ Africans on the continent and those across the diaspora.”

“I want to capture what does self-love and healing looked like for LGBTQ African immigrants,” Owunna says. “I wanted to capture that as part of my own healing process.”

This fall, Owunna is expanding his project further into Europe, a mission for which he has launched a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter.

Below, see some of Owunna’s images, along with quotes from the people he’s photographed.

“Bisexuality sometimes feels less accepted, because people would rather you ‘make up your mind and just choose,’ or ‘get over this phase …'” –Gesiye, a bisexual/queer Nigerian-Trinidadian, living in Trinidad.

“I’m a hard femme with an hourglass silhouette, a goodwill budget and a firm grasp of anti-capitalist rhetoric. I wear whatever makes me feel comfortable and powerful and safe.” –Netsie, a queer Ethiopian-Namibian, living in the U.S.

“I’ve always been around white LGBTQ people and they didn’t really see me as queer. Also, being a femme woman and not being a lesbian hasn’t helped either. I’m seen as “unreliable” because I’m attracted to men as well, even though I’ve been out since I was 12 and discovered my attraction to girls long before boys and other gender identities.” –Juliet, a queer Ugandan-Rwandan living in Sweden.

“I love to represent my Africanness, especially in white queer spaces since there is this notion, mostly from white queers, that Africanness and Queerness does not go hand in hand.” –Samuel, a queer Ethiopian living in Sweden.

“To the queer Africans that would be shunned by their community, family and/or country; to the queer Africans that are in desperate need of an answer and feeling lost as to where to look for it: I know the feeling.” –Mai’Yah (second from the right), a queer Liberian living in the U.S.

“I’m black, I’m African. My ancestor, my roots are not coming from this hate culture of the diversity and homophobia that the colonizer brought to us.” –Toshiro, a queer/bisexual Ivorian living in Canada.

“On my best days, I’m serving dementor who has eaten all the souls she needs to get her life back lol. But I also channel some pink princess looks when I’m feeling cute and deceptive.” –Kim, a trans Burundian living in Canada.

“As I got older I realized there was a certain power in being ‘different.’ I have access to a culture and community that the majority of my peers didn’t. Starting in university, I started to embrace all facets of who I am because that’s what I need to survive.” –Taib (center), a queer Ethiopian-Kenyan living in Canada.

“I tend to incorporate a lot of Afro-centric elements to my clothing … but also keeping it simple and cute when I need to face capitalism.” –Sizwe (right), a queer Burundian living in Canada.

Limit(less) is a documentary photography project by Mikael Owunna exploring the visual aesthetics of LGBTQ African immigrants. Read more here.

The post How one photographer is challenging the myth that being LGBTQ is ‘un-African’ appeared first on PBS NewsHour.