Some of the most historic photographs of 9/11 are so powerful, they are written in America’s collective memory. One of those photographs came from photographer and New Yorker Gulnara Samoilova. But for as memorable as her photographs are – winning a World Press Photo Award and Pulitzer nomination – Samoilova, in shock, covered in dust and bleeding, says she reacted on pure photographer’s instinct.

At the time, Samoilova was a photo editor working for the Associated Press and living just four blocks away from the World Trade Center. Woken by sirens well before her later shift started, she grabbed several rolls of film, her Canon T90, and walked out the door.

Samoliva, who is now a street photographer and the founder of Women Street Photographers, started taking photographs in disbelief as rescue workers began carrying out the injured. That’s where she was, standing across the street, when the first tower collapsed.

“As I was standing across the street from the World Trade Center, I heard the trembling noise and I lifted my viewfinder. I saw the tower was about to collapse. I took one photo. Then someone shouted ‘run!’ and we all started running,” Samoilova said, telling her story to Projections NYC as part of a multi-day effort to record the history of more than 35 photographers who witnessed 9/11.

“I look back and see this cloud,” she said. “I fell by a parked car so I quickly sat by this parked car, and this cloud of debris and dust just enveloped us. I felt like I was in a tunnel. The impact was so powerful, and then it was dark and it was complete silence to me.”

“Someone was next to me, we were there for a while. I began choking because there was no air,” she said. “I couldn’t open my eyes, I was choking and coughing. He asked, ‘are you okay,’ and I said, ' No, no, I’m not okay, I’m pregnant…I thought I was buried alive. We went from blue skies to complete darkness.”

When the dust cleared enough to see the lights from the emergency vehicles, the photographer, bleeding from a scraped elbow during her fall, looked around and saw the silhouette of survivors emerging from the cloud of dust.

“My photographer’s brain turned on, which I couldn’t admit for the longest time until a few years ago, but I thought, what a beautiful composition,” she said of that moment. “I took one shot, and I blacked out.”

“I didn’t pass out,” she explained, but, in shock, she acted by instinct and blocked much of what happened next. “I changed film from color to black and white, changed lenses. I just started shooting, but I don’t remember it. All my award-winning pictures were next to each other, and I don’t remember taking them.”

“The camera is a shield, like it’s looking in from the outside,” Samoilova said. “That’s how the camera helps me in any situation over my 45+ years.”

In the face of tragedy, photojournalists are tasked with the job of recording history at a time when taking photographs may be viewed by some as insensitive. Samoilova recalled a moment with a police officer before the towers fell. “One of the police officers was yelling at me like, ‘How can you photograph this?’ and I told him, ‘This is for history.’ And I kept shooting.”

Samoilova took 100 frames on film that day on her Canon T90. The following day, eleven of those photographs had been published all over the world, and immediately, the people in the photographs and the family members began reaching out to her.

“They wanted to see my negatives. They wanted to find loved ones. They wanted to find the people that saved them. I would meet with them, and they would share their stories…we became friends,” she said.

“It made me realize how important it was for them and for me, for my mental health too. The importance of having those pictures helped them heal faster, to realize that they have pictures of the people who saved them.”

One of the survivors in the Samoilova’s photographs was trapped in an elevator with her friend. Firefighters were able to help the two friends to safety, but when the first responders went back in, that was the moment that the tower collapsed. One of the women later came to the AP office to look through the negatives in order to identify the first responders who had saved her life.

Samoilova’s story is one of many. In the days leading up to the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Projections NYC interviewed more than 35 photographers about their experience behind the lens during and after the tragic day in American history.

Another round of interviews is scheduled for September 11 at 7 PM ET via Zoom. The interview series will also be uploaded to Projections NYC’s YouTube in the coming weeks.

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Mario Tama had only been working as a photojournalist for Getty Images for about two months – not yet long enough to consider himself a true New Yorker – when he got the call from his editor. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Unable to call a taxi, he ran towards the devastation, camera in hand – and 25 years later, Tama’s photographs of 9/11 remain a devastatingly poignant part of American history.

“I was a new New Yorker,” Tama said in an interview, part of a large-scale effort by Projections NYC to document the 9/11 story of more than 35 photographers. “I was so new that I had never taken a photo of the Twin Towers. I had seen them, and they were like my North Star. You could figure out where you were by those towers. I always thought I would wait and get them in better light.”

Unable to get a taxi, Tama made his way towards the Twin Towers on foot that morning. At one point, he was stopped from getting any closer by an NYPD barricade that, he believes, saved his life.

Tama instead went around towards the south side of the South Tower, near Cathedral Trinity Church. Photographing the plumes of smoke coming from the South Tower, he ran into fellow Getty photojournalist Spencer Platt, who told him, “This is the story of our lives.”

“I was in a panic trying to get as many images as I could,” said Tama, who was using one of the earliest professional digital cameras, the Canon EOS D30, a 3.1MP DSLR. “Being a new New Yorker, I wish I had that gravitas perspective, but [Platt] shook me and he grounded me in a way that I wasn’t before.”

Tama was making his way towards the South Tower when he heard a sound that, to this day, he finds hard to describe. “I looked up, and the top of the South Tower started to tilt and collapse. The sound echoed down the canyon, and it was completely horrifying.

“I went from being a photojournalist to just another New Yorker running for their lives…at some point during my sprint, I remember looking back, and there was this tornado cloud of dust coming towards us. In hindsight, if I had stopped and taken a photograph, it would have been a powerful image, but I kept sprinting towards a parking garage. The dust storm cloud went over everything after that.”

It was after the dust settled that Tama took a photo of two civilians huddled near a wall, one praying in English, one praying in Spanish.

“The only thing that I knew was to put that camera up to my eye and keep photographing,” Tama said. “I think it was a shield in a way and also a way to process what happened…the camera was my tool, and I just started walking around photographing, looking for survivors. It was an incredibly horrifying feeling to realize that those of us out here had survived and so many others inside had lost their lives. The only thing that I knew to do was to take photos.”

The moment that Tama began to feel like a true New Yorker wasn’t experiencing the day of 9/11, but in the days that followed. On September 13, he was in a shell-shocked apartment building with the windows blown out, climbing the stairs in order to try to get high enough to see Ground Zero.

He made it to the ninth or tenth floor, where he captured a photo of lines of emergency responders and volunteers amid the rubble.

“Looking down on that scene, it was the first time that I felt hope,” he said. “To see all these incredible, brave workers of all stripes – police, fire, construction workers, hospital workers, civilians all there, trying to dig out and this hope over fear feeling swept over me. I just put the cameras down and wept. At that moment, I think I became a New Yorker and fell in love with the city.”

“I’m honored to have this photograph and this recollection….In my mind, [this incredible humanity] won, they won. New Yorkers just showed incredible humanity and heart and it’s something I will hold with me forever.”

Projections NYC is spending six days interviewing 36 photographers who photographed 9/11 and the aftermath to record their stories for history between September 6-11. The series continues with live Zoom broadcasts at 7 PM ET on September 10 and 11.

The interviews will also be uploaded to Projections NYC’s YouTube page approximately 1-2 weeks after the live broadcast.

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For more stories behind the images of 9/11, read about how Joe McNally photographed life-sized Polaroids of the first responders, or read about Thomas Hoepker's controversial 9/11 image.

It's over a century since the RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, on April 15 1912, after striking an iceberg during its maiden voyage that resulted in the loss of over 1,500 lives.

And yet, this tragedy still has a hold over our collective consciousness. So much so, that even this much-circulated photo of a boy selling a newspaper announcing it will be instantly recognizable to many.

But who was this boy, stood outside the White Star Line's offices on Cockspur Street, just off Trafalgar Square in London, the following day, holding a placard reading "Titanic Disaster, Great Loss of Life"?

For most of the 20th century, he was simply known as "the newsboy." In fact, his name was Edward John Parfett – known to his friend as Ned. And unfortunately, this would not be the only time in his life that he was associated with tragedy.

The story of Ned

Born in 1896 to an Irish Catholic family, Parfett worked in construction before an injury pushed him into newspaper selling. He was around 15 or 16 when the Titanic photograph was taken, one of four brothers from Cornwall Road, Waterloo, who'd all eventually enlist for the First World War.

He joined the Royal Artillery in 1916, first as a dispatch rider, later moving to reconnaissance duties at the front. It was dangerous, exposed work – and Parfett was good at it.

He was mentioned in dispatches and awarded the Military Medal for gallantry, with an officer later writing that Parfett had accompanied him "on many occasions" through severe shelling and that he'd always placed "the greatest confidence in him".

Of the four Parfett brothers who served, three came home. Ned didn't. On October 29 1918, less than a fortnight before the end of the war, he was killed near Valenciennes when a shell hit the quartermaster's stores where he was collecting fresh clothes ahead of leave.

Had he survived another two weeks, he'd have been going home to England. He's buried at the British war cemetery in Verchain-Maugré in northern France.

A face that outlasted its name

The Titanic picture Ned is remembered for today did its job well, conveying the shock and grief of the moment far better than any headline. Yet Ned was never identified in the picture caption and, for decades, he remained an anonymous figure, even as the photo continued to circulate.

It took researchers and Parfett's own descendants, including his great-nephew Dominic Walsh, to finally identify Ned in the late Nineties; a soldier who'd been mentioned in dispatches and decorated for bravery, and who died in a war only a few years after the Titanic sank.

Oceanic House, where the picture was taken, is now home to a Tex-Mex restaurant. And the photographer? We still have no idea who they were.

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Perpignan is a southern French city near the Mediterranean coast and the border with Spain. With a population of around 120,000, it's pretty slow-paced for most of the year. But all that changes for a couple of weeks in late summer, when it suddenly becomes the world capital of photojournalism.

Churches, convents, even a former prison get turned into galleries, and almost twice the town's population again turns up to experience the most immersive pictures of wars, famines and everyday life the profession has to share.

Visa pour l'Image, aka The International Festival of Photojournalism, was the creation of one man, and this week we sadly lost him. Jean-François Leroy died on August 31, of cancer, at his home in Paris, aged just 69.

He lived to see this year's 38th edition of Visa open, and although he wasn't well enough to attend, was fully involved in selecting the programme. That included choosing the headline exhibition: a retrospective of the work by the French photographer, photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Raymond Depardon.

Why Visa matters

Launched in 1989 with the backing of Roger Thérond, the editor of Paris Match, Visa pour l'Image has proved to be far more than just a way of extending Perpignan's tourist season. For many, it's been an professional lifeline: a free, public festival where those with no gallery representation or book deal can still get their work seen by picture editors, agencies and juries.

That ethos of supporting photographers is firmly in the festival's DNA, not least because Leroy came up through the trade himself. Born in Paris in 1956, he first shot assignments for Sipa Press before moving into editing at Photo Magazine, where he became editor-in-chief. However, he judged his own pictures harshly and decided his real talent lay in championing other people's.

That instinct for spotting and backing talent became the foundations on which Visa pour L'image has prospered: discover young photographers, celebrate the ones already known, and rediscover the historic ones the industry has let slip.

It made him plenty of friends and just as many people who found him exhausting. Tributes this week describe a tall, chain-smoking, skull-ring-wearing figure who could be tough and critical. But he was also someone who changed lives: the French photographer Axelle de Russé recalled hanging up on him, thinking his phone call telling her she'd won a Visa award was a prank.

What makes his death particularly poignant is the theme he chose for this, his final festival: "Reality strikes back", a direct response to the threat of AI-generated imagery to the profession. He leaves the festival team pledging to keep Perpignan "a beacon for photojournalists". Long may it continue.

I'm always on the lookout for movies about real photographers, from dramas like Lee (2023) to documentaries like All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022). So my eyes perked up when I saw that H for Hawk (2025) had recently popped up on my Netflix homepage. 

To be clear, its plot isn't about photography at all: it's the true-life tale of how English academic and naturalist Helen McDonald (played by Claire Foy) dealt with grief over her father's sudden death through training and bonding with a bird of prey. 

But the father she's grieving for was a real-life photojournalist, and to my mind his story is just as interesting. 

Alisdair Macdonald, who's played in the movie by Brendan Gleeson, spent 26 years shooting for one of Britain's biggest newspapers, the Daily Mirror, and also helped launch Today, Britain's first full-color national paper. 

He photographed the Beatles from 1963 onward, travelling with them to Paris for their Olympia shows, and kept snapping the individual members well beyond their split in 1970. He picked up a World Press Photo award in 1989, in the humor category, for a shot of a workman fleeing a burst water main.

All of these details are subtly woven through this film in a way that adds extra emotional depth to the main character's sense of loss and grief. 

This climaxes in the film's eulogy scene, in which Helen delivers a tribute to her father built around a slideshow of his own photographs. These are Alisdair Macdonald's actual images, many of which live on in the Getty archives today.

Work ethic

McDonald left school at 15, trained at Regent Street Polytechnic and was hired by the Mirror as its youngest staff photographer at just 20. By Helen's own account, he was the type to scope out a location then stand there for the best part of a day rather than risk missing the shot. 

In the case of his shot of Charles and Diana kissing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after their wedding, that meant a full 24 hours of not eating and drinking, after which he was dreadfully ill and nearly collapsed.

Macdonald didn't just apply this approach to professional life, but his own personal projects too.

Above: trailer for H is for Hawk

"At home, dad rigged up infrared beams over ponds to photograph bats swooping to drink, their complicated noses pressed to watery darkness," she once told Woman And Home. "One year he fixed a glass-backed nest box to the shed and photographed a pair of blue tits rearing their brood of chicks: the whole family was entranced."

Just to be clear, this is a movie about the daughter, not the father, and birds not photography: allusions to the latter are purely incidental to its main plot or themes. But as an example of a real-life drama hitting the right notes, both in terms of Alisdair Macdonald himself and his approach to photography, it deserves full marks nonetheless.

The best photos tell a story without words – and photojournalists are tasked with the job of taking photos that transcend language barriers. This week, some of the most striking news photographs that I’ve seen highlight the power of a good camera angle.

What’s included in the photo and what’s not are equally important to telling a story in a photograph. From natural disasters to the mourning of a country music legend, these are some of the best pieces of photojournalism that I’ve seen for the week of August 23.

A front door without a house

Scrolling through the top news images of the week, this photograph by Idriss Bigou-Gilles forced me to stop and take a deeper look. Shot amid the aftermath of the August 25 tornado in Pomas, southwestern France, the photograph shows a front door without a house.

The front door is often the first thing that homeowners see when returning home, the first thing that makes them feel at home. The photographer’s choice to frame this front door in the center of the image amid very obvious destruction tells a story and makes the devastation feel more human.

A Dolly Parton memorial

The stars on the edge of this frame hint where this photograph was taken – the Hollywood Walk of Fame – but it’s the name in the center that shows what this photograph is really about: Dolly Parton. The aerial photograph by Justin Sullivan shows just how many mourners left behind flowers and mementos in the wake of the country music legend and philanthropist’s death at age 80.

While an aerial shot of the star alone would have shown the impact of Parton’s passing, the two people passing a box that says “Dolly Parton’s Sweet Cornbread” over the pile of memorabilia is a perfectly timed moment that gives the view an innately human element.

An aerial view of a mudslide

The aerial view of this photograph tells a story of what happened without a caption: a flash flood and mudslide. Photographing the edge of the mud along with houses now colored the same hue creates a visually striking image while telling the story of the devastation of Nepal’s flash flooding on August 27. Looking closely, I can see sprinkles of colored debris on the edge of the mud.

According to the metadata, photographer Prabin Ranabhat took this photo with a DJI Air 3S drone.

An aerial shot of a wildfire’s aftermath

Aerial drone shots have a unique ability to illustrate just how widespread a natural disaster is. In this shot by Brook Mitchell, a lone farm sits amid patches of burnt land at Tintwistle Moor, the site of one of England’s largest wildfires in recent years.

Taken more than a month after the fire, the photo illustrates the long-term effects and highlights the drought that continues to make wildfire risks high.

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Thirty years ago, Leonard Jefferson took what turned out to be the last known photo of rapper Tupac Shakur. Jefferson is now back in the news, as a witness in the trial of Duane "Keffe D" Davis, who stands accused of Shakur's murder.

And you don't necessarily have to be a fan of hip-hop to find the details of his photograph fascinating.

Jefferson, for one, wasn't a photojournalist working an assignment. He was simply a tourist, stuck in traffic on his way to get a pizza. The camera he had in his car wasn't anything special, either. It was a point-and-shoot APS film camera, a Nikon Nuvis 125i.

On September 07 1996, Jefferson pulled up at a red light around Flamingo Road and Koval Lane in Las Vegas, and noticed a black BMW beside him with shiny wheels. He recognized Shakur in the passenger seat and Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight driving.

He'd met Shakur earlier in life as a film student at UCLA, and also in his work as a car salesman.

Jefferson called out, they briefly chatted about where they were heading, and he asked if he could grab a picture before the light changed. Shakur agreed. Jefferson turned, took the photo, and the light went green. Moments later, he heard four shots. Shakur died of his injuries six days later.

The gear isn't the point

There was no method to this picture; no planning, no lighting rig, no careful lens choice. Just a guy with a compact camera who knew someone slightly, and asked permission nicely.

It's a keen reminder that while professional gear might get you into a room, it's rarely what makes a picture matter.

Jefferson's Nuvis was a mid-range consumer camera built for holidays and family gatherings, not photojournalism. And yet it produced an image of Shakur's final hours that's spent three decades running the length and breadth of print and online media.

A heady mixture of proximity, recognition and nerve led to a slice of modern history that's unlikely to be forgotten for generations to come.

These kind of celebrity shots are rarely taken with permission. Indeed, they often stem from some pretty underhanded paparazzi tactics. Not in this case, though.

Jefferson asked. As a result, there's a relaxed quality to the picture. Shakur is looking straight into the lens, aware that he's being photographed, entirely comfortable with the situation. It's bittersweet that his last-known image was not one of fear, anger or sadness, but calm and easy-going.

Jefferson has only taken the camera itself out of storage twice in three decades, and the negatives sit in a vault. A short film about him and the picture is now in development, and is raising money through a GoFundMe page.

It's all a sharp reminder that the significance of a photograph isn't always obvious the moment you take it. The camera in Jefferson's car wasn't expensive. What he did with it, though, nobody can put a price on.

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Born in 1926, photographer Sal Veder died on 22 August, eight days short of his 100th birthday, at his home in El Dorado County, California. Even if his name is new to you, you'll probably know his work. In particular Burst of Joy, which came to symbolize the emotions of Americans around the end of the Vietnam War.

On 17 March 1973, working for the Associated Press at Travis Air Force Base, California, Veder photographed Lt Col Robert L Stirm's family sprinting across the tarmac to greet him after more than five years as a POW.

His daughter Lorrie, arms flung wide and both feet off the ground, was the picture's beating heart. It won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography, and has been reprinted more times than almost any American news photograph of the last century.

Slava "Sal" Veder was one of dozens of photographers jammed into a press pen that day, all pointed at the same runway, all working the same light and same distance. Shot on a Nikon SLR, what separated his frame wasn't a longer lens or a faster shutter finger; it was a keen sense of how events were unfolding. In the corner of his eye, he clocked the kids breaking into a run. That instinct, more than any equipment, is key.

The timing was also important. Veder captured this shot on deadline, in a scrum, then processed his film in a makeshift darkroom set up in a women's bathroom on the base, so he could wire his picture before the competition did. The rest of his career, ranging from campus protests to the Patty Hearst trial and the Moscone-Milk assassinations, was founded on the same mix of positioning, patience and speed.

Filed under humor

Something often gets forgotten in all of this. The picture everyone remembers as pure joy has a second, sadder story underneath it. Three days before that homecoming, a chaplain had handed Stirm a letter from his wife asking for a divorce. She'd come to the base that day only because appearances demanded it, and the marriage was over within a year.

In that light, it's strange to reflect that when World Press Photo judged its 1974 contest, Burst of Joy took first prize not in News or Feature photography, but in the Humor category. That's not a criticism of the judges, of course; it's more a recognition of what a photograph actually is.

A picture doesn't carry its back story in the file. It simply carries what a moment in time looked like, and it's up to the viewer to interpret what it means. The idea this shot was filed under Humor says more about how badly we want reunions to be pure and simple than what was actually happening on that runway.

The lesson, then, isn't anything specific about Vietnam, or even about Veder. It's about the gap between what a photograph shows and what a photograph means, and how quickly other people rush to close that gap for you.

Veder gave the world an image; the world decided what it was about. Every photographer working today hands over that same power every time they share a frame. As for viewers, it's worth remembering: next time a picture looks perfect, it may not be as perfect as it seems.

“Where were you on 9/11?” The answer to that question for many Americans, including myself, is that we were watching the events unfold across our television screens. But for photojournalists, the answer is quite different: they were watching history unfold from behind a camera.

Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more than 30 photographers are coming together to share their stories of what it was like to photograph the event that changed modern American history.

Projections NYC is bringing together the photographers, photojournalists and photo editors who witnessed 9/11 and the events that followed firsthand. For 6 days, the organization will broadcast live interviews with the photographers, beginning on September 06 at 19:00 EST.

The series has already confirmed more than 30 photographers, including Spencer Platt, who photographed the moment the second plane struck the World Trade Center; Steve McCurry, who photographed the towers falling from the roof of his apartment building; and Eric Draper, who was the Chief White House photographer at the time.

Additional photographers confirmed to be part of the event include Joel Meyerowitz, Pete Souza, Ron Haviv, Jennifer S Altman, Thomas Franklin, Mark Edward Harris, MaryAnne Golon, Stan Honda, Ruth Fremson, David Friend and Rabbi Irwin Kula.

The series of interviews follows the tragedy of 9/11 across Ground Zero, Flight 93, the Pentagon, the White House and communities across America. Projections NYC says that the series covers not just the first photographs of 9/11 but also the photographers following the aftermath over the ensuing years.

The series arranges the interviews across 6 days, culminating on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. The interviews will both be broadcast live worldwide and recorded for the public record, the organization says.

“Before history was written, it was photographed,” the organization wrote. “… They edited the images that informed the world. They documented not only a single day, but the years that followed, creating an enduring visual record of one of the defining events of our time.”

The series is set to livestream each evening between September 06 and September 11 at 19:00 EST via Zoom. Reservations for the Zoom broadcast are available from Projections NYC.

Photojournalists are witnesses to the world’s stories – but how the photographer chooses to frame the photograph is a key part of the story. This week, photographers around the world highlighted everything from community gatherings to watch the solar eclipse to the devastating impact of war and climate change.

I’m a photographer and a journalist, and looking through the top news photos this week reminded me of the power of perspective.

Patterned sandbars emerge from the receding Danube River

A drought has pushed the Danube River to record low levels. This shot by Marko Perkov reveals some of the hidden sandbar structures that the receding waters revealed. While the pattern in the sand is striking itself, the huddle of umbrellas and beach towels, colorful swim rings, and swimmers in the water give what would otherwise be a landscape shot a human element.

Perkoc took this shot with the DJI Mavic 4 Pro drone near Ilok, Croatia.

A rarely seen perspective of a nesting stork

The nesting sites for large birds look like a jumble of sticks from the ground, but this drone shot by Nenad Mihajlovic offers an unusual perspective of a stork in its nest, photographed as part of a recent study that suggests that this urban site where the stork built on a pillar for an unfinished building in Novi Sad, is one of the largest of its kind in Serbia.

The light is hitting the nest just right, making the ground below fade into near darkness and drawing attention to the bird, which almost seems to be giving the camera a wary side-eye. The telephoto lens on the DJI Air3S helped minimize the disturbance to the animal.

Child’s play amid a war

Perspective in photography isn’t just about getting the camera to an unusual height – it’s about what scenes the photographer chooses to photograph to tell a story. This photo by Ahmad Hasaballah is a photo of a child’s football (soccer) match, and yet the story that it tells is one of the Israel-Hamas war.

The photograph comes from a game organized by the Palestine Amputee Football Association in northern Gaza City, Gaza. The photographer notes that the children have all lost limbs from the Israel-Hamas war and accidents.

A horse fleeing from a wildfire

This shot by Huw Fairclough is almost picturesque with the warm sunlight hitting the horse – except for the wildfires in the background. The photograph, taken on August 09 on the Llangynid Moor in Wales, shows the horse making its way away from the flames.

The photograph is just one of several striking photographs calling attention to the recent uptick in wildfires over the summer across the globe.

A solar eclipse in a sunflower field

What strikes me most about this shot from Palencia, Spain, by Leon Neal is that the solar eclipse seems to mirror the shape of the sunflowers. Choosing to make the subject the smallest part of the frame while filling a majority of the image with foreground elements is unusual, but effective at drawing the eye and making an eclipse photo that stands out.

The eclipse was the first time that Spain was in the path of totality since 1905.

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If you, like me, live in an area prone to wildfires, you know the dangers. But wildfires also present some remarkable opportunities to make spectacular images.

I have lived in the small, western Canadian town of Logan Lake for 22 years, and in that time we have had many small fires (sadly, some deliberately set) and two major fires.

In 2021 the Tremont Creek fire burned 63.548 hectares / 157,029 acres of forest. Our town was evacuated, and the flames came within 1,000 feet / 300 meters of our home. Fortunately, not a single home or garden shed was lost thanks to some amazing firefighters.

So, while there are terrific photo opportunities, there are also some ground rules that must be observed – both for your own safety and for the safety of the wildland firefighters.

First, never get close to the fire. It can kill you. Worse, your getting in the way can put the lives of the firefighters in danger.

The second is to never use flash. Not even fill flash, no matter how good an idea it seems at the time. Speaking as an old pilot, a flash can be distracting – and when a pilot is distracted, even momentarily, while flying that close to the ground, it can be disastrous.

Third, if you own a drone, never fly it near a fire, for very obvious reasons. All that said, there are great opportunities for making remarkable images.

One of the great places to start is with the smoke. You need not be close to a fire, for the smoke can travel hundreds of miles, but you do need to be observant.

Above is a shot taken at 05:00, from a motel parking lot, while walking the dog. There were no nearby fires, but the air was thick with wildfire smoke and the rising sun was almost blocked. I couldn't resist the view over parked transport trucks.

I got my start shooting wildfires back in 2009, by making the lead image at the top this article.

We’d been down at our local horse club and noticed a light plume of smoke in the distance. When a lady we knew arrived, we asked her if she knew the cause. “A car fire," she said. So, when we were done, about ten minutes later, we bundled the grandkids (then aged six and eight) and drove up to check out this car fire.

We found the fire, but not the car. As we stood, watching, the Bird-Dog (a small, fast, highly maneuverable plane that directs water bombers and air tankers as they fight the fire) came in for a low pass, with a very loud fire engine’s siren playing through a loudspeaker.

I didn’t know they did that, but it’s a warning to those on the ground that an air tanker or water bomber is coming and to get out of the way!

Moments later, a Conair S-2 Firecat (first photo) came in and dropped his retardant. Luckily I had my camera with me, as I nearly always do. We were about 130 feet / 40 meters from the action, but there was nobody around to tell us otherwise. So we stood and watched, and when the mop-up crew came in by helicopter 20 minutes later we went home!

But the shot is sharp enough that, in an 8x10 print, you can clearly see the pilot flipping switches on the panel above his head.

The fire turned out to be deliberately set and, as the crow flies, only 3.5 miles / 5.5 kilometers from our front door! I was glad to see that one put out.

In May 2018 I was driving home on Tunkwa Lake Road when I came across this lone helicopter, putting out a very small fire. It was equipped with a belly tank, rather than a bucket on a long line, and was flitting between a pond, where he loaded up, and the fire, which was less than 1,000 feet / 330 meters away.

Again he was working solo, and there was nobody on the ground to interfere with, so I stopped, got out and fired away. The light was perfect!

As I write this, we are under an evacuation alert – which means that we must be ready to leave on a moment’s notice. The Guichon (pronounced Gee-shone) Creek wildfire is less than 0.9 miles / 1.5 kilometers from my front door.

Cars are packed with photos, important papers and a few keepsakes. Fuel tanks are full and nobody wants to stray far from home, so there is lots of time to photograph the air tankers and such.

But there is a slight problem. As the air tankers come in to drop their load of retardant, what you’d expect to be a lovely, tack-sharp shot of the plane dropping its bright-red retardant turns out to be anything but.

First of all, to get a decent close-up of the planes you’ll be shooting with a long lens, likely the longest you have (I use a 100-400mm on a Micro Four Thirds camera and it’s nearly always at 400mm, which is 800mm in full frame terms), and the smoke creates a haze that can mute the colors.

Second is that the intense heat rising from the fire below can create hot, turbulent air that distorts everything, much in the same way that objects in the distance look distorted across an expanse of hot desert, or far away on a hot highway.

If you are lucky enough to have the small Air Tractor AT-802 converted crop dusters, you can always go to the nearby lake where they skim the surface to reload their tanks. A small pipe extends into the water, and they scoop up 793 gallons / 3,000 liters of water in just 15 seconds!

You certainly won’t bother any of the firefighters there, and watching six of them come in at once, just eight to ten seconds apart, is really quite spectacular. Just stand on the shore and shoot!

Even if you’re not near a fire, there is still lots to photograph. The moon is a great candidate to shoot through wildfire smoke. If the smoke is really thick, you can try the sun, such as the shot above, taken in the early evening. (Never point your lens at the sun, unless it is extremely dim!)

The texture you see is not “grain” or “noise”, but the particulates of smoke in the air. If possible, wait until the sun is low enough to include a tree, building or something else to give it scale.

Lastly, there are always interesting things to shoot after the fire is out. The landscape often looks more like a moonscape.

If your area has / had evergreen trees, you’ll notice that when the needles burn, they do not turn black nor do they get consumed. They become an odd shade of yellow / orange and, had you told me this before I saw it for myself, I’d never have believed you, but it’s true. We call them “never greens” and the needles finally drop off four to five years later.

Both during and after a wildfire, there's lots to photograph without being a “pain in the patoot” for the firefighters. But honestly? I hope you never have the chance.

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Amid record-breaking drought and unusually high wildfire risks the photographs coming from the lenses of the world’s photojournalists this week look almost like otherworldly si-fi. A pink landscape that isn’t from an infared camera. A desert-like shot that’s actually London in drought. A heavily damaged roadway in Japan.

I’m a photographer and a journalist and these are some of the best news photos that I’ve spotted this week.

A drought photo illustrating the power of texture

This photograph caught my eye for both its use of irony and texture. In this shot by Glyn Kirk, East Sussex’s Falmer Pond is reduced to a bed of texture, making the “no fishing” sign feel ironic.

An off-centered composition and the shadow cast by the sign further drew my eye into the photograph.

A low-angle highlighting Japan’s earthquake

This photo from Jiji Press draws attention to the long-lasting impact the July 28 earthquake in Japan has on the region’s roadways. By using a low-angle perspective, the photographer draws more attention to the cracks in the road than a photo shot from eye level. The person in the background adds more interest to the shot.

The July 28 earthquake hit a region that’s key to the manufacturing of camera sensors. Sony’s sensor plant was shut down but expects to be fully operational by mid-August, while a Fujifilm plant reported no significant damage but noted some products may be delayed.

A suburban scene that’s anything but normal

I did a double take when I saw this photograph because at first glance it looked like it came from an infrared camera, as infrared tends to turn green landscapes pink. But that’s not what this shot is. Instead, fire retardant turns the normal scene into an otherworldly-looking image.

The shot by Josh Edelson highlights the efforts of first responders to prevent the spread of the early August fires in Spokane, Washington.

A desert-like aerial shot of London

At first glance, this photo looks like a shot from a desert – but the city in the distance of this aerial shot is actually London. Shot by Dan Kirkwood with a DJI drone, the aerial view mixes London’s historic All Saints Church with an unusually brown scene as the region faces a drought following three heatwaves.

What I love about the photo is how the aerial view creates a view that looks more like the edges of a desert. The green trees in the distance and the London skyline are a sharp contrast to the church and the brown tones that are echoed both in the dead grass and the historic building.

Dramatic trails of light from the Fuego volcano

A longer exposure time turns the lava and sparks from the Fuego volcano south of Guatemala City into a striking photograph. The lava flows light the edges of the volcano, echoed in the streaks of ash falling from the eruption.

Johan Ordonez captured the shot on August 04 as Central America’s most active volcano sparked emergency alert levels while villages nearby evacuated.

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Scroll through the coverage of the historic 1965 Selma to Montgomery civil rightsmarch and you'll find plenty of close, urgent pictures. Clenched jaws. Raised placards. Martin Luther King mid-stride at the front of the crowd. James Karales' contribution to that archive, now touring as part of Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder, does something dramatically different.

Rather than focus on faces, Karales stepped back, dropped low and let a vast, roiling thunderhead swallow two-thirds of the frame. The marchers become a ribbon of silhouettes along the bottom edge, faceless, anonymous; their only individual detail a hat brim here or a raised flag there. On paper, it really shouldn't work as well as it does. And that's exactly why it's worth studying.

Karales was on assignment for Look magazine, having trained under W. Eugene Smith at Magnum, and by 1965 he'd already spent years learning to find the quiet, introspective moment inside a chaotic news story rather than reaching for the obvious drama. That instinct is all over this frame.

Ulimately, it lets the Alabama sky do the emotional work: an enormous dark cloud bearing down on a line of people walking toward an uncertain future. The American flags rippling above the crowd read almost as an act of defiance against the weather itself.

It's the kind of picture that photojournalism students are taught to avoid making. No hero shot, no identifiable protagonist, no clean single point of focus. Yet it's arguably the most reproduced, most instantly recognisable image to come out of Selma that isn't a portrait of King himself.

The importance of structure

What makes the picture work is entirely down to structure. Karales shot from a low angle, almost at ground level, which does two things at once. It pushes the marchers' silhouettes up against the sky rather than the landscape behind them, and it exaggerates the scale of the cloud looming above. The horizon line sits low in the frame, roughly a fifth of the way up, leaving the sky to dominate.

That's a brave ratio to commit to on the day. The instinct of most photographers would be to give the subject more room and the sky less. Here, though, the cloud isn't background, it's practically a second subject; a visual stand-in for the pressure and menace the marchers were walking into.

The use of silhouette matters too. By exposing for the sky rather than the crowd, Karales strips away individual identity and turns the marchers into a single mass; a movement rather than a collection of people.

It's a technique documentary photographers still reach for when they want an image to speak for a cause rather than a single participant: think of any wide, backlit shot of a protest march since. Karales was doing it with a 35mm camera and no idea if the shot would work until the black-and-white film came back from the lab.

A lesson in restraint

There's a broader lesson here: sometimes the most truthful picture isn't the one that gets you closest to a face. Karales' choice to hang back and let atmosphere carry the weight produced an image that's outlasted plenty of tighter, more conventional shots from the same march. It's proof that restraint, when well judged, can hit harder than proximity.

Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder, including Karales' Selma to Montgomery March, Alabama, is at the Southampton Arts Center until to September 27, before touring to Sarasota, Charleston and Miami through early 2028.

As a professional photographer, I’ve seen a lot of stunning photographs – but there’s one image in particular that stopped me in my tracks this week: a “fire-breathing dragon of clouds.”

What keeps drawing me back to Maximilien Lamy’s photograph taken along the shore of France’s Lake Lacanau isn’t just the dramatic cloud rising off the Gironde wildfire, but the beachgoers calmly sitting in the sand, relaxing under an umbrella.

The beachgoers are a dramatic contrast to the crisis unfolding in the distance. The eerie contrast feels as if it carries a message, heavy with the reality that with the wildfires raging since mid-July, life continues amid the state of emergency. The contrast also speaks to the cause of the wildfires as the beachgoers cool off amid record temperatures.

This week, wildfires caused France’s first pyrocumulonimbus cloud – wildfire clouds that are hot enough to cause their own thunderstorm. NASA describes the rare weather phenomenon as a “fire-breathing dragon of clouds.”

According to the photograph’s metadata, the image was taken with a Huawei smartphone, a reminder that the right composition can create a powerful image regardless of what gear was used.

Lamy’s photograph may have stopped me in my tracks, but that’s not the only incredible image that I’ve seen coming from photojournalists this week.

Sheltering at a metro station in Kyiv

When I first saw this image by Oleksii Flippov, I had to look closer to grasp what I was really looking at: people taking shelter in a metro station during a missile strike in Kyiv, Ukraine.

The unusual angle taken from the top of an escalator both draws my eye deeper into the photograph and illustrates just how crowded the station was, as the floor of the station is so full there’s even someone resting at the very bottom of the escalator itself.

The photograph, taken on July 30, is a sobering reminder of the continuing conflict in Ukraine.

A funeral from a dramatic angle

The circular shape and architecture in this photograph by Getty’s Kenny Holston immediately drew my eye to the funeral unfolding in the center of the frame. The image comes from the funeral of late US Senator Lindsey Graham on July 28.

The photograph uses the iconic architecture of the Rotunda in the US Capitol to draw the eye to the flag-draped coffin in the center of the frame. Holston used the Nikon Z9 and the Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 S ultra-wide to fit the scene and architecture into the frame.

A dramatic drone shot of a wildfire’s aftermath

This drone shot by Oscar Del Pozo shows the reality of what residents face after a wildfire. In the photo taken on a farm west of Madrid, Spain, goats dot the scorched earth after a wildfire went through the farm.

The shot was taken with a DJI drone. The unusual angle draws attention to not just the goats but the animals' shadows. Another reason that I find the image striking is that the goats seem to match the color palette of the scorched earth.

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There's a photograph in Keith Armstrong's newly discovered archive that stops you in your tracks. A man in a wheelchair grins defiantly, surrounded by Metropolitan Police officers. A red London bus looms behind him, its destination board reading Trafalgar Square. It's the kind of image that could have run on the front page of a national newspaper.

Actually though, it didn't; because Armstrong (1950-2017) wasn't a press photographer filing for an agency. He was a disability rights activist, shooting from his wheelchair, from inside the demonstration, for the movement itself.

Born in South Africa then raised in England, Armstrong spent the 1980s and 1990s documenting the campaign for disabled people's civil rights in Britain: the bus blockades, the protests outside Parliament, the pickets and direct actions that eventually helped bring about the Disability Discrimination Act in 1995.

He did it with an Olympus camera, film, and the kind of access no photojournalist on assignment could ever have bought – because he was one of them. Shooting at wheelchair height gave his images a ground-level intimacy that places you inside the crowd, rather than observing it from a distance.

Uncovering the archive

His archive was discovered after his death, when members of his estate contacted Shape Arts, the disability-led arts organisation. What looked like boxes of unsorted negatives turned out to be something extraordinary: more than 500 images documenting one of modern Britain's most significant and least-photographed civil rights movements.

The collection has now been digitised and made publicly available through the National Disability Movement Archive and Collection at ndmac.org. And here's the best part: it's entirely free to use for exhibitions, publications, social media and more, with a simple credit to Armstrong and NDMAC.

Why they work

What makes Armstrong's work remarkable isn't just its historical significance; it's the vantage point. Photojournalism of protest tends to work from the edges: the telephoto lens compressing a crowd, the wide-angle from a press pen, the elevated position that gives context but sacrifices proximity. Armstrong had none of those options, and the results are more powerful for it.

His images are close, chaotic and alive. Protesters hold handwritten cardboard signs reading "No more begging, we want rights now!" and "Disabled people arrested trying to catch a bus! Why?" Police officers loom large in the frame. There's wit in some of the placards, fury in others.

One image shows a woman in a wheelchair smiling serenely between two officers as a London sightseeing bus fills the background. The composition is almost classically street-photographic; the kind of accidental perfection that experienced documentary photographers spend careers chasing.

Another image, shot on New Oxford Street, in central London, shows Armstrong himself crouched low, Olympus raised, recording a police van and an officer from below eye level. It's a reminder that the disability rights movement produced its own visual culture, its own recorders, its own history, largely invisible to the mainstream photographic press at the time.

Intimate storytelling

"Keith wasn't just photographing disabled people and their allies," says David Hevey, chief executive of Shape Arts. "He was photographing from within the movement. His images place you alongside the activists. They completely change how we see this history."

That reframing is significant. As interest grows in overlooked and alternative histories of Britain, Armstrong's archive fills an important gap: a body of work that is activist and artistic simultaneously, documentary and intimate, historically vital and visually compelling.

Carbon monoxide and other greenhouse gases are invisible, but photographers are capturing the effects of a warming planet in a way that’s impossible to ignore. As several regions struggle with record-breaking heat, drought, and wildfires, photojournalists are turning their lenses to document the very visible effects of a global issue with an invisible cause.

I’m a photographer and a journalist, and as I was looking through the top news photos of this week, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern. Photojournalists are capturing the effects of a warming planet in a way that turns an invisible cause into a very tangible photograph – and it echoes the top photos from last week as wildfire smoke created eerie photographs with an apocalyptic feel.

These are the best photos from photojournalists that I’ve spotted this week.

A striking image of a melting glacier

This photograph by Sean Gallup shows two researchers walking across the sediment left by a melting glacier, the Isunnguata Sermija in Greenland. A group of researchers began a six-week campout where the scientists will document the changes in the Greenland Ice Sheet.

The photograph is an excellent example of powerful framing that tells a story. The low angle highlights the sediment with the glacier misted in the background. Including two researchers in the photo rather than just an empty but changing landscape gives the photograph a human element.

Firefighters silhouetted by a wildfire in France

This photograph by Romain Perrocheau stopped me in my tracks. I can’t see the firefighter’s faces, but I can feel the exhaustion radiating off them in their stance alone.

The photograph is a powerful example of what a minimal, tightly-framed photograph can do. The pattern of the bright orange smoke instantly conveys the subject, yet leaves space for the eye to go immediately to the firefighter’s stance in the middle of the composition.

An empty river bed

In this photograph by Nikolay Doychinov, boats and a bridge lie in the dry river bed of the Danube River between Bulgaria and Romania.

The aerial view of the river helps demonstrate the scale of the issue, as record temperatures had led to low water levels. But it’s color that creates a strong composition here. All three boats have the same blue that helps them stand out against the dull colors of the dried riverbed.

A perfectly-framed shot of rain in NYC

According to the United Nations, climate change is exacerbating water-related crises like both drought and flooding. This photograph was taken while New York and New Jersey were under a flood watch. The image is a color shot (as evidenced by the red in the clothing and the yellow sign on the rocks), but the weather and moody exposure make this image feel nearly like a black-and-white photograph.

Photographer Spencer Platt could teach a class on composition with just this image. The archway uses the frame-within-a-frame technique that immediately draws the eye to the subject. Placing the couple holding umbrellas against the gray skyline rather than a dark background helps the subject stand out. Then, there are even leading lines as the Brooklyn Bridge further draws the eye into the photo.

A striking night shot

There are three light sources in this image – manmade lights, stars, and a wildfire. The photograph by Thibaut Durand of Abaca Press depicts the historic Horloge des Hermes clock tower and the lights of the town of L'Argentière-la-Bessée, France, as a wildfire burns on the French Alps in the background.

As a photographer, I know just how difficult it is to capture astrophotography mixed with manmade lights, as artificial lights tend to wash out the stars. Not only did Durand capture both, but a wildfire as well. The sparks coming from the wildfire almost feel like additional stars.

Photographs have power, and these five photos demonstrate how a good photograph can draw attention to key global issues.

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Chilean Patagonia, an area famed for its towering granite peaks, crystalline glaciers, and vast, rugged wilderness so beautiful it almost seems like the picture-perfect South American region was crafted by an artist.

Yet two of the most highly commended images from this year’s Patagonia Photo Contest shed light on something much more personal than these iconic vistas.

Timothy Dhalleine's Another Day at the Office, crowned king of the “Culture & Travel” category, and Adolfo Molina Soto's On-Site Purchase, an honorable mention in the same category, reveal the local communities whose livelihoods continue to shape one of the world's most remote landscapes.

Above: Adolfo captured his honorable mention using a Sony A6500 paired with a Sony E 15mm f/1.4 G lens, opting for ISO 100, 1/350sec and f/6.7

An exchange on the southern channels

As two fishing boats drifted alongside each other in the glacial channels of Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire) in Southern Chile, Adolfo was ready and waiting aboard one of them with his camera in hand. He'd already witnessed this scene on a previous trip, but, in his words, failed to capture the “essence” of the moment.

"I wanted to show not only the fishermen, but also the surroundings, the boat, the hands, the interaction, and the vastness of the landscape. More than a portrait, I was looking to tell a story,” said Adolfo.

Used the backdrop of the glacier-capped Darwin Range mountains to frame the maritime interaction rather than overwhelm it, Adolfo ensured the fishermen trading their shellfish catch for supplies remained the center of attention.

Shellfishing has been a traditional way of life in Patagonia's southern reaches for thousands of years. The original specialists were the Yámana (or Yahgan) women, who would brave the sub-Antarctic waters of the Beagle Channel foraging for mussels, limpets, and sea urchins. These days, fishermen still dive to the depths of the icy waters, albeit with modern wetsuits and breathing apparatus.

“The photograph speaks as much to the fishermen’s work as it does to a tradition of connection, trust, and exchange that still thrives in those southern channels,” said Adolfo. “They [the fishermen] represent a way of life that still exists in very isolated parts of Patagonia—a way of life we rarely have the opportunity to experience up close.”

Above: Timothy used a Nikon D750 and a 200-500mm f/5.6 lens to shoot his award-winning frame, opting for a focal length of 240mm, f/6.3, 1/4000sec and ISO 250

The most spectacular office in the world

Gazing upon the majestic landscape from Estancia Cerro Guido, one of the largest ranches in Chilean Patagonia, Timothy watched as thousands of sheep flowed across the rolling plain, directed by local cowboys, or gauchos. Dominating the scene, and dwarfing the cowboys, were the towering, iconic peaks of Torres del Paine.

“I stepped back to create a composition that emphasized both the sheer scale of the 8,000 sheep and the immensity of Patagonia,” said Timothy. In doing so, he transformed the photograph into a story as much about the people in the frame as the landscape itself. “The contrast between the tiny figures of the gauchos and the vast wilderness was exactly what I hoped to convey,” he added.

The seasonal movement of sheep across Patagonia's ranches (called "estancias") before the arrival of winter is, according to Timothy, one of the region's “most remarkable” events to photograph. Each autumn, gauchos guide thousands of sheep to lower, warmer grazing areas before the harsh weather sets in.

Sheep ranching has played a central role in shaping Patagonia’s history since the late 19th century, but this traditional way of living off the land and livestock has become more contentious in modern times.

While farmers hunt native predators like pumas, who frequently kill their sheep for food, as well as herbivore species like the guanaco (similar to a llama), who compete with livestock for the nutrient-poor steppe grasses, conservationists aim to protect these species, who bring balance to and restore ecosystems.

The people and the place

Rather than capturing single-dimensional depictions of a remote yet beautiful wilderness, the photographers delved into the layers of work, relationships, and traditions which animate the region. "We often think of Patagonia solely in terms of its landscapes, but behind them there are also communities, trades, and ways of life that deserve to be known and valued," said Adolfo.

For Timothy, there is hope that these communities and their traditions can “coexist” with nature rather than be seen as obstacles to conservation."I hope this award helps bring greater visibility to the human story that exists alongside the pristine wilderness of southern Patagonia," said Timothy. "[..]People can preserve their cultural heritage and continue making a living from traditional livelihoods while protecting the natural world around them," he said.

Instead of celebrating Patagonia simply for its dramatic landscapes, these commended photographs invite us to see it as a place also defined by the people who continue to fish its southern channels, herd sheep across its plains, and maintain traditions that have endured for generations. In doing so, they reveal a richer, more complete portrait of Patagonia—one in which spectacular scenery and human stories are inseparable.

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I can still remember the first time that, standing with a camera around my neck and aching feet, one of the members of the bridal party told me that I had done a great job. I must have looked confused. The wedding wasn’t even over yet, the photographs had yet to leave my camera – how did she know my photographs weren’t terrible?

The bridesmaid wasn’t complimenting my photographs; she was simply thanking me for something quite simple: Not being rude.

Photographs should never come before people. But perhaps no one has expressed that idea more eloquently than the iconic photojournalist who used the camera to create historical poetry: Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Perhaps you’ve never heard the name Eisenstaedt, but you’ve seen his work. The German-born photographer who went on to spend 40 years at LIFE Magazine was the photographer behind the historic V-J Day photo in Times Square of a sailor kissing a woman in a nursing uniform at the end of World War II.

“Never boss people around,” Eisenstaedt said. “It’s more important to click with people than to click the shutter.”

There are two key ways that this statement from a legendary photographer, who lived from 1898 to 1995, applies to modern photography.

The first is simply that hiding behind a camera does not permit photographers to be terrible human beings. As a wedding and portrait photographer, how I connect with the people in front of my lens has a strong correlation to how the images turn out. If my actions make that person uncomfortable, angry, or frustrated, those photographs won’t be loved, no matter how technically perfect they are.

But I think there’s another way this iconic quote can be applied to modern photography, in that good photographs don’t just “click” with the person in the photograph. Great photographs “click” with the people who view them.

I can’t count the times I’ve seen “terrible” photos go viral with poor composition or bad lighting, but what’s more important is that those photos click with people; they trigger an emotional response. Creating an emotional connection with the viewer matters more than technical perfection. In fact, people may connect more with photographs that aren’t perfect, after all, humans are imperfect creatures.

Eisenstaedt’s connection to the people he photographed is undoubtedly why the photojournalist’s work remains some of the most impactful images in history. When he stood in Times Square on V-J Day, he wasn’t just a photographer, he was also a Jewish soldier who served in World War I, but moved to America in 1935 amid increasing persecution. I bet standing behind the camera on that day in 1945, he clicked with the soldier and the nurse in the iconic photograph.

Yes, the technical side of photography is important, but never more important than “clicking” with both the people in front of the camera and the people viewing the photographs.

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A number of the photographs that I’ve come across this week look as if they were shot on the scene of a post-apocalyptic movie – but the devastating wildfires across the globe, sparking eerie, smoke-filled scenes, are not the stuff of Hollywood imagination.

Photojournalists this week have managed to capture haunting photographs following a devastating number of wildfires across the globe, from Canada to France.

Abnormally high temperatures have sparked a series of wildfires in several regions, including Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The fires have not only devastated communities directly impacted by the flames, but have also created widespread impact as smoke creates dangerous air quality across many regions.

Smoke is difficult to photograph – yet a number of photojournalists have captured eerie images of the fire’s devastation. I’m a photographer and a journalist, and I think these are some of the best news photos this week, from wildfire devastation to earthquake aftermath.

A haunting contrast between smoke and an iconic landmark

This photograph by Getty Images’ David Ramos is a haunting representation of some of the biggest headlines from the US this week: heat, smoke and immigration.

Ramos took this photograph from the Staten Island Ferry, capturing the Statue of Liberty – an iconic symbol of immigration – through the window, shrouded in yellow haze. A single silhouetted person surrounded by empty seats adds to the eerie feel of the image.

Ramos chose to focus on the Statue of Liberty rather than the person in silhouette, drawing more attention to the yellow, hazy skies.

An eerie image that captures both the heat and the smoke

Heat is something invisible that cannot be directly photographed, but I can feel the heat coming off this image from the Toronto Star’s Steve Russell.

The photograph, taken on July 15, captures a person swimming to escape the heat with the Toronto skyline blanketed in yellow smoke in the background. The tight framing lends the photo a lonely, eerie feel, as if the man in the water is the only person around.

Pilots fight a wildfire in Italy

The dangerous conditions mean many of the photos coming from this week’s wildfires are of the smoke rather than the flames themselves. This image by Alberto Lo Bianco, however, shows some of the reality beyond the impact on air quality.

In the photograph, a firefighting airplane drops its water load on a line of flames in a wildfire on the slope of Mount Longa near Palermo, Sicily, Italy.

A haunting photograph of the aftermath of Venezuela’s earthquakes

This haunting photograph creates a devastating portrayal of another type of natural disaster – the twin earthquakes in Venezuela. While the earthquakes happened last month, this photograph from July 16 shows the continuing devastation as volunteers and family members search the rubble.

Photographer Federico Parra exposed the photograph for the light held high over two searchers kneeling in the rubble. The light draws attention to the devastation while leaving the rubble in darkness. Officials this week said the death toll has climbed past 4,800.

A statement written in chalk

The words “This is blood” are written on the pavement at the site of a fatal Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting of a 26-year-old man from Colombia.

Photographer Ryan Murphy captured a photo of the words written as protests in the aftermath of the Maine shooting, which occurred days after a fatal shooting in Houston, Texas. Photographs are often tools to portray what words cannot, but the chalk words create a devastating photograph.

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Contrast in photography doesn’t always mean dark shadows and bright highlights – sometimes that contrast comes from a stark difference between the subject and the background.

From a viral photo of a person of color surrounded by a group in white masks to a serene scene clouded by a ship full of plastic, some of the most striking photojournalism this week highlights the power of contrast.

When I flipped through some of the best pieces of photojournalism from Getty this week, July 03-10, I realized that the most striking images are the photographs that use the power of contrast.

I’m a photographer and journalist, and I think these are some of the best news photos this week.

A stark contrast to America’s 250th birthday

The United States’ 250th birthday brought images of iconic Americana, from lightning and fireworks over the Home of the Braves to patriotic parades. But one of the most striking images of the week has gone viral for highlighting the racial tensions in modern America.

During the 250th anniversary celebrations in Washington DC, white supremacist group the Patriot Front marched in the city. The group’s white face masks are a sobering contrast to the red-white-and-blue celebrations.

The contrast becomes an even more humbling reminder of the racism that clouds both America’s history and present when the group’s stark white face masks are photographed among people of color. This shot on the subway by Getty’s Finn Gomez shows the masked group on the subway as a Black person waits by the subway doors.

Another shot of the Patriot Front on the subway by Reuters’ Cheney Orr went viral for the contrast, depicting a Black woman sitting alone on the train, surrounded by masked men. The striking contrast between the woman’s expression and the masks around her captures the other side of the Fourth of July celebrations in a devastating but important piece of photojournalism.

A serene landscape marred by bright plastics

A trash-filled barge floating on a serene, blue and green natural landscape highlights the power of contrast in photography. The buildings in the distance seem to have the same colors and variety as the litter on the ship.

The image comes from Michael Dantas on assignment covering the recent studies that flag an alarming amount of microplastics found along the banks of the Rio Negro in northern Brazil.

An unusual view of iconic architecture

Iconic architecture is often well photographed, but this striking view of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris immediately caught my eye. Taken underneath the iconic archway, looking up, the shot captures fighter jets in a practice run, preparing for the upcoming Bastille Day parade.

The unusual perspective invites the eye through the entire image and highlights the shape of the jets flying in sequence under a bright blue sky.

Historic architecture under modern criticism

The Washington DC Reflecting pool is another landmark that’s regularly photographed, but this shot uses the reflection of the Washington Monument to highlight the protests around the pool. A visitor stretches to take a shot of the pool over the fence erected around the moment after algae bloomed after a recent renovation.

The shot was captured by Getty’s Andrew Harnik during protests outside the arrangement for David Hearn, a former Olympian, who has been accused of damaging the pool.

The contrast of modern warfare

The woman in this photograph looks perfectly normal – but it's the bright clothing and the way she's going about her day on her phone that's a stark contrast to the rescue workers in the background.

The photograph, by Kostiantyn Liberov, is part of a series on daily life in Ukraine in 2026 that shows how life is unfolding as the war between Russia and Ukraine continues. This shot was taken on July 06 after a missile strike in Kyiv.

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Sir Don McCullin has been given one of Britain's highest civilian honors in a list of new awards released to celebrate King Charles III's birthday. The celebrated photojournalist, who is now 90 years old, has been named a Companion of Honour for services to photography.

The Order of the Companions of Honour was initiated by King George V in 1917 and is one of the rarest honours in the United Kingdom, as it is only held by a maximum of 65 people at one time.

Nowadays, the honour is awarded to those who have made a "major contribution to the arts, science, medicine, or government lasting over a long period of time". Other living holders of the title include Sir David Attenborough, Sir Elton John, and Dame Anna Wintour. The actress Helen Mirren was named alongside Don McCullin as the 389th and 380th people to ever have received the title. A further vacancy in the Order was created with the recent death of the artist David Hockney.

Don McCullin was knighted back in 2017 and is best known for his harrowing images of confilct and famine around the world, which he shot for the Sunday Times Magazine in the 1960s and 1970s.

Last week, it was announced that a new book of his photographs of the Vietnam war, including many that have never been published before, will be published later this year.

Over the years, the assassination of John F. Kennedy (JFK) has raised all sorts of questions, from who fired the fatal shots to the ownership of various photos and films of the president on that infamous day in Dallas, Texas, 1963.

Now, the latest of these disputes, between The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza (SFMDP) – the official JFK museum in Dallas, Texas – and a private photo collector has been settled in US copyright court, with the ruling in favor of SFMDP.

The image in question, simply known as the Motorcade Portrait, depicts JFK riding in the open-top Lincoln Continental alongside his wife, Jacqueline, shortly before the president was shot and killed. Lee Harvey Oswald was later accused of the assassination, firing from the building that is now the museum.

In the image, which can be viewed at the museum's website, Texas governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, are in front of the president, with Secret Service agents William Greer (also the driver) and Roy Kellerman ahead of them.

The image was shot on Kodacolor 35mm slide film and is one of five slides, according to the museum. The image is notable because most of the car's occupants are facing the camera.

According to the claim, which was filed with the Copyright Claims Board (CCB) in September 2024 by private collector Cade Campbell, the museum had been physically displaying the photo since 2012, flouting what Cambell believed was his copyright.

Campbell maintained the image was taken by Jack Jordan at Dallas Love Field Airport, where Jordan was an employee, and where Kennedy and his wife had flown into the morning of the assassination. According to Campbell, after Jack’s death, the image passed to his son, Ron Jordan, who later sold the image to Campbell.

The court, however, sided with SFMDP, who said the image was taken by Jack Titus as the motorcade drove down a local street. The photo was the fourth in a series of five Titus took, which later passed to his wife, who subsequently donated them to the museum.

This version of events was backed up by Reverend Richard Tullius, who was among the same group of photographers as Titus the day Kennedy was killed, and who had also owned copies of the five-shot series.

Campbell had registered the image with the US Copyright Office in 2014 and even claimed that, on the day he bought it, Jordan (now deceased) signed a sworn affidavit stating that his late father had even touched the President’s hand before snapping the image, but this evidence was deemed weak.

While the ruling has ultimately decided on who owns the Motorcade Portrait, it raises questions around how Jack Jordan obtained his copy of the image, which Campbell believed to be the original all these years.

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Shutter speed plays a key role in capturing the “feel” of an image and is arguably the best tool in a photographer's kit for transmitting the energy of a scene. While controversial, the images taken during an infamous night of book burning carried out by the Nazis in Berlin shortly after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 are perfect examples of this.

The shots were taken on May 10, 1933 during what came to be known as the Book Burning at the Opernplatz (today known as Bebelplatz).

That night, Nazi student groups, professors, and paramilitary members collectively set ablaze some 20,000 volumes of literary work by Jewish, liberal, leftist, and pacifist authors, with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels even appearing to make a speech.

In sharp images of that day, the way in which the books are frozen flying through the air and the arms of their throwers freeze in historic detail. The hatred written on the crowd's faces is terrifyingly frozen in time.

But, take a look at how the mood changes from another photo taken on the same day when the photographer used a slow shutter speed, turning flying books into ghostly blurs and creating an eerie feel that strikes me to my core.

Whether the photographer – most likely George Pahl, a photojournalist – intentionally composed the frame with a slow shutter speed or if this was the result of the technology of the time remains unknown. However, if he’d frozen the motion, I don’t think it would have told the story of the night quite as accurately as the motion blur does.

The Book Burning at the Opernplatz marked the climax of the "Action against the Un-German Spirit," a widespread antisemitic campaign organized by the German Student Association in the spring of 1933. It systematically purged German universities and society of cultural, political, and intellectual works that didn’t align with National Socialist (Nazi) ideology.

The long exposure photo from that day in 1933 captures the tragic day in history with a ghastly atmosphere that makes the photo feel even more frightening.

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Three people sit against a stone wall somewhere in Luxembourg in 1944: a tall American soldier on the left, a small French boy on the right, and a woman in the middle wearing a steel helmet and a wide grin, a camera hanging round her neck. It looks like a holiday snap. It is, frankly, the opposite of one.

The woman is Lee Miller. The photo: Me with smallest and tallest. At the time it was taken, she was one of the only accredited female war correspondents embedded with the US Army, filing photographs and dispatches to British Vogue from the front lines of the European theater.

Within months, Miller would be among the first journalists to enter the liberated concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, sending back images so extreme that her caption read simply: "I implore you to believe this is true."

A few weeks after that she was in Adolf Hitler's apartment in Munich, washing the mud of Dachau from her boots in his bathtub as a colleague photographed her.

None of that darkness, though, is visible here. What you see instead is a woman completely at ease, laughing with a giant soldier and a local kid, at home in a war zone in a way that speaks to something essential about what made Miller such an exceptional photographer.

She didn't observe from a safe distance. She was in it, among people, trusted and trusting. And the camera around her neck was as much a part of her as her helmet.

It's this image that the organizers of Lee Miller: A Woman at War have chosen as the press photograph for a new exhibition, opening in Oxfordshire this month. And it's a smart choice because, to my mind, it does more to explain her than almost any of her famous images do.

From modelling to the front line

Miller's route to Luxembourg was, to put it mildly, not conventional. She was one of New York's most sought-after models in the 1920s, a collaborator and lover of Man Ray in Paris, a pioneer of solarization and a serious Surrealist artist in her own right.

By the time war broke out she was living in Hampstead, London, with the British surrealist, Roland Penrose. She got herself accredited as a war correspondent for Condé Nast, talked her way around military restrictions on female journalists and embedded herself with the US Army rather than the British, who wouldn't have her.

Her first wartime assignment for Vogue was, as it happens, closer to this exhibition's home: she photographed nurses at what was then a US Army hospital in Oxford: Headington's Churchill Hospital.

Those images feature, among others, in Lee Miller: A Woman at War, which opens at Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock this weekend, running until September 13. It follows a major show at the Tate and brings her work back to a county where part of her war story began.

The show covers the full arc of her wartime output: the women's war effort she documented for Vogue from 1942, the Normandy invasion and liberation of Paris, the concentration camps, and the surrealist visual intelligence she brought to all of it.

Her Rolleiflex cameras, US Army helmet and Hermes Baby typewriter feature as objects alongside the prints, grounding the work in the material reality of what it took to make it.

Miller was technically exacting in a way that her biography tends to overshadow. She had spent years learning to see, first as Man Ray's student and collaborator in Paris, then running her own portrait studio in New York.

That training is visible in the wartime work: the precise compositions made under pressure, the instinct for the image that would carry the weight of the moment.

None of that can be seen, of course, in the Luxembourg snapshot, which was taken by an unknown photographer. But it's significant nonetheless, as a picture of someone exactly where they wanted to be.

Lee Miller: A Woman at War is at Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum, Woodstock until September 13 2026. Open Tues-Sat, 11:00-17:00, and on Sundays and Bank Holidays from 14:00-17:00. Last admission is 16:30 every day.

A massive project is underway in the UK to photograph women members of parliament (MPs) to celebrate the milestone of 40% female representation in British politics achieved following the 2024 general election.

To date, The 40% Project has seen more than 250 serving women MPs photographed by some 130 women photographers, with a goal to publish the images in a commemorative book later this year.

Sue Wright, Chair of the RPS Women in Photography Group, the project organizer, said: “When women reached 40% representation in Parliament, we felt very strongly that this was a moment that needed to be documented — not just politically, but photographically too.”

Women MPs from across the political spectrum have featured in the project, including well-known figures such as Suella Braverman, the former Home Secretary and now a member of Reform UK, and politicians currently making waves such as Hannah Spencer, the most recent Green Party member elected to Parliament.

“This isn’t about politics. It’s about representation. We wanted to create a visual record of a moment in history before it simply became another statistic,” Wright said.

Going “beyond traditional political portraiture,” Wright said the images reveal the personalities “behind the role,” perhaps best seen in the portrait of Liberal Democrat MP Tessa Munt — known for visiting local farmers — photographed sitting atop a mound of apples at an orchard far from the halls of Westminster.

The images also reflect the broad range of creative styles the photographers have brought to the project, often working not only creatively but quickly around MPs’ busy schedules, with some shoots lasting no more than 15–30 minutes.

While the project celebrates the public servants at the center of the portraits, it’s also an ode to the women photographers behind the cameras, who Wright says historically have also been “missing from the visual record.”

The 40% Project is underway now and is close to completing the remaining portraits. Currently, there is no date set for the publication of the project book, however, a Kickstarter campaign to support its publication, along with planned exhibitions, launches in July.

More information about The 40% Project and how to get involved is available on the Royal Photographic Society website.

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If you've had any training in a creative discipline, you've probably at least heard of the Bauhaus. Despite only being open for a few years (1919-1933), this groundbreaking German art school shaped modernist design and visual thinking and cast a long shadow over 20th-century photography. One of its students was Edith Tudor-Hart, a Jewish Austrian woman who studied there in 1928 and later settled in London, where she became one of Britain's most compelling documentary photographers. She also became a communist spy. And yet until recently, most people hadn't even heard of her.

Recently, though, that's begun to change. A German biography written by her cousin Peter Stephan Jungk, titled Die Dunkelkammern der Edith Tudor-Hart, appeared in 2015; an English translation, The Darkrooms of Edith Tudor-Hart, will shortly will be published by Haus Publishing. He also made a documentary film, Tracking Edith, which showed in UK threatres in 2017. And now a new biography by Daria Santini, A Woman Named Edith, has been published by Yale University Press. 

The story these works tell is a remarkable one. And for photographers in particular, it raises some uncomfortable questions about whose work gets remembered and why.

Tudor-Hart arrived permanently in Britain in 1933, having married English doctor Alex Tudor-Hart in Vienna and fled with him to escape prosecution for her communist activities and the rising fascism that made her position as a Jewish woman untenable.

The couple moved first to South Wales, where her husband practised as a GP in the Rhondda Valley. She photographed the coal-mining communities there, and later, based in London, documented the poverty of the city's slums and the daily lives of a working class still gripped by depression.

Her images appeared in The Listener and other publications, and she was a credible enough figure in British photography to serve on competition juries. She was, by any measure, a serious practitioner.

Political outlook

The Bauhaus gave her something specific: an eye for structure, for the arrangement of figures and light, for images that communicated with directness and force. Her social documentary work sits comfortably alongside that of her contemporaries. In some cases it surpasses them. Yet while figures like Bill Brandt, who also photographed working-class Britain in the 1930s, dominate historical accounts, Tudor-Hart barely gets a mention.

Partly that's down to circumstance. She was an émigré, a woman, a communist and perpetually short of money – partly because she refused on principle to take payment from her Soviet handlers. She was under MI5 surveillance for most of her adult life. Her marriage broke down, her son Tommy developed serious mental illness and she raised him alone with few resources. After the war she retreated from public life, opened an antique shop in Brighton and died in 1973, largely unknown.

She's also been largely ignored by photography historians because the spy story swallowed everything else. She was instrumental in recruiting the Cambridge spy ring, introducing the British intelligence agent Kim Philby to his Soviet handler after vetting him. She was linked to the Woolwich Arsenal affair, a Soviet operation to steal weapons blueprints from a London munitions factory, with camera receipts in her name found as evidence. These are irresistible stories, but also have a habit of obscuring the photographer behind the espionage.

A significant photographer

Author Santini doesn't let that happen. She makes a strong case for Tudor-Hart's significance as a photographer, tracing the Bauhaus influence through her British work and placing her within the broader tradition of socially engaged documentary practice. Of course, the spy material is here too, meticulously researched using newly available MI5 files and private photo archives, but thankfully, it doesn't crowd out the woman who made the pictures.

Ultimately, there's a particular irony in Tudor-Hart's obscurity. She spent her career arguing, through her images, that working-class lives deserved to be seen, that the camera could make the invisible visible. Then history did to her exactly what she spent a lifetime fighting against: it looked away.

For photographers, this is the story worth paying attention to. Tudor-Hart understood something the best documentary photographers still understand: that the camera is never neutral, that the choice of subject is always political, and that clarity of vision can speak louder than works. The new book is published by Yale University Press at £25.

A Woman Named Edith: Emigre, Photographer and Secret Agent, the Extraordinary Life of Edith Tudor-Hart by Daria Santini is published by Yale University Press, 384pp, £25. 

The man who shot arguably the most famous photograph taken in the aftermath of the Aberfan disaster – which later went on to win the British News Photographer of the Year award in 1966 – has told the BBC that the image still “haunts” him after all these years.

On October 21 1966, Mel Parry, an 18-year-old apprentice photographer with local outlet the Merthyr Express, was passing through the South Wales village of Aberfan on a bus when he was alerted to the disaster that had just unfolded.

A slag heap from a coal mine had come loose, sliding down the hillside and engulfing part of Pantglas Junior School and a number of houses in the village below.

In total, 144 people were killed – 116 of them children, mostly aged 7-10, and 28 adults – by what the media described as a “tsunami of sludge”.

Parry headed to the disaster site and began photographing when he captured PC Victor Jones carrying eight-year-old Susan Maybank to safety. In the image, Maybank can be seen limp in the police constable's arms while her aunt looks at the child in grief amid a background of crowds conducting the rescue effort.

Speaking to the BBC about his award-winning image, Parry said: “It’s a tragedy and unfortunately I ended up gaining from it,” adding, “I wish I’d never taken it.”

In the days following the disaster, as the rescue effort continued, Parry – who had family in Aberfan – discovered that two of his cousins were among the victims. The disaster and loss of family members weighed heavily on Parry and, in the early 1970s, he gave up his career as a press photographer.

However, Parry wasn’t the only professional photographer to document what happened at Aberfan. Renowned Welsh photojournalist and Magnum Photos member, David Hurn, also had boots on the ground, as did American photojournalist IC Rapoport.

The latter headed to the South Wales mining town just days after the tragedy on assignment with Life magazine, later publishing the frames he captured in his book Aberfan: The Days After.

With the 60th anniversary of the Aberfan Disaster fast approaching, Museum Wales (Amgueddfa Cymru) plans to commemorate it on October 01 with a series of exhibitions at several of its museums.

Ceri Thompson, curator of coal mining collections at Museum Wales, told me that David Hurn's images will be on show, as will Mel Parry's award-winning shot.

More details about the commemorative exhibitions and their locations will be available on the Museum Wales website.

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Every year, on the third Saturday of May, the US celebrates Armed Forces Day – a tribute to all personnel currently serving across all branches of the nation’s military.

From those in the reserves to those stationed on active duty in regions of the world away from home, the day is dedicated to everyone who wears a US military uniform in some capacity.

While today is not specifically dedicated to soldiers of conflicts past, images captured of US service personnel who risked their lives in wars gone by still embody the struggles and sacrifices that the nation’s current military personnel face and make.

This first image is particularly poignant as it depicts African American soldiers who risked their lives in the trenches of World War I, despite widespread racism back home and within the US military.

We see soldiers of the 369th Infantry Regiment, famously known as the “Harlem Hellfighters”, returning to New York City aboard the SS Pocahontas in February 1919 following the end of the war.

The men depicted are decorated heroes of the regiment, proudly displaying the Croix de Guerre – a high military honor awarded by the French government for bravery in combat.

These men served under French command because, at the time, the US Army was racially segregated and many white soldiers refused to fight alongside Black troops.

Although valued less than their white comrades by high command, the Harlem Hellfighters became one of the bravest and most respected units of the war, earning a fierce reputation among German forces.

As for the photographer who captured the image, we may never know – their identity was never documented and has since been lost to history.

In this second image, we see the iconic flag-raising at the Battle of Iwo Jima, when six Marines hoisted the US flag atop Mount Suribachi.

Although the moment took place on the fifth day of the battle (which continued for another 31 days), the photo came to symbolize American victory and unity among its fighting men.

By the end of the battle, three of the men who raised the flag had been killed, while the surviving members – two of whom were initially misidentified – later toured the US on a bond drive to support the war effort.

The photographer, Joe Rosenthal, was working for the Associated Press when he captured what has become perhaps the most iconic image of US military personnel ever taken.

After the war, Rosenthal went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for the shot – which appeared on newspaper front pages across the country within weeks of being taken.

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Canon has announced the rollout of its new Authenticity Imaging System, a C2PA-compliant solution designed to help news organizations verify the provenance and history of images from the moment they are captured.

Launching in May 2026 across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the system has been developed for use with supported Canon cameras, initially the EOS R1 and EOS R5 Mark II.

With the growing impact of generative AI and the increasing risk of manipulated or fake images entering the public domain, Canon’s latest move places image authenticity firmly at the center of modern photojournalism.

At its core, the Authenticity Imaging System embeds provenance information into an image at the point of capture. This creates a verifiable record that can follow the file through the full editorial workflow, from intake and editing to distribution and publication.

For newsrooms working under constant pressure to publish quickly while maintaining trust, this could become an increasingly important part of protecting the integrity of visual journalism.

The system is based on the C2PA standard, developed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, and is designed to manage image provenance records, issue certificates, apply trusted timestamps and verify content history.

In practical terms, it enables news organizations to demonstrate where an image came from, how it has been handled and whether its history remains intact.

Canon joined both C2PA and the Content Authenticity Initiative in 2023, and has since been working on provenance management technology based on international standards.

Its latest system uses manifest information generated by C2PA-compatible cameras, then applies public certificates and trusted timestamps to help preserve a reliable record over time.

Ahead of the official launch, Reuters worked with Canon on technical testing using the R1 and R5 Mark II with the Image Authenticity feature enabled.

According to Canon, the testing showed that authenticated provenance data could be generated reliably, offering an early indication of how the system may be used within professional news environments.

While the initial focus is on newsgathering, Canon says it is also exploring wider applications in areas where authenticity is critical, including government, healthcare and research.

As image trust becomes an increasingly important issue across multiple sectors, systems like this may become just as essential as the cameras themselves.

For photographers, editors and publishers, this is not simply another technical feature. It is a response to one of the biggest challenges facing visual media today.

In a world where images can be created, altered and distributed in seconds, Canon’s Authenticity Imaging System is a clear attempt to protect the credibility of real photographs and the professionals who make them.

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) was a celebrity of his time, not only because of his unique writing style, characterized by intense, musical lyrics, but also because of the enigmatic multitude of personas he embodied.

Seen as a charming yet reckless, selfish, and insecure genius, Thomas exuded energy in public, often fueled by alcohol, but was considered shy and vulnerable in private. Over his short but intense career, many portraits depicted the Welsh Bard, capturing his complex nature, and today, on Dylan Thomas Day, we examine a selection of these.

The date of this first image has been lost to time, but we see a young Thomas, most likely captured in his early 20s during the mid-1930s. Unlike most men, who would've dressed formally, mostly in suits during this period, Thomas rocks a flamboyant style, wearing a patterned cardigan and necktie, hinting at the charisma he would later become known for.

Here we see a more stern-looking Thomas alongside his wife, Caitlin Thomas (née Macnamara), in the bar of Brown's Hotel, Laugharne, South Wales, around 1938. The couple had a tumultuous but enduring relationship that lasted until the writer’s death in 1953, famously marked by intense drinking and literary gatherings.

In this photograph, Thomas acts during a one-night performance of "Desire Caught By the Tail." The photograph was originally published in 1950, covering Pablo Picasso's play. Thomas never feared being in the limelight, the following year appearing as an extra in the 1951 film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, which starred Ava Gardner and James Mason. This brief appearance is believed to be the only known moving image of the Welsh poet.

Arguably the most famous portrait of Dylan Thomas, this shot was taken in New York while Thomas was directing the first performance of "Under Milk Wood" at the 92nd St. YM-YWHA Poetry Center. Prominent American photographer Rollie McKenna (1918–2003), known for her portraits of writers and artists, snapped it, later recalling that just an hour before, Thomas was extremely unwell but mustered the strength to direct for three hours — his fierce energy captured in his pose.

Thomas drank himself to death in 1953 at the age of 39. Over a short-lived career, he burned like a wildfire, and we’re left with his iconic writings but also portraits that show the man whom critics labelled as a “dazzling obscure poet who can be enjoyed without understanding.”

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Some photographers snap picturesque landscapes or evocative portraits; others capture some of the most defining moments in human history. James Edward “Ed” Westcott (1922-2019) was one of the latter.

As one of only three official government photographers assigned to the top-secret Manhattan Project, Westcott photographed not only the development of the atomic bomb – the weapon that would ultimately end World War II – but also the bomb’s principal creator, J Robert Oppenheimer.

Westcott grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and began taking photos at the age of 12, when he received his first camera. In 1941, aged 19, he joined the US Army Corps of Engineers as a photographer before being assigned to the Manhattan Project site at Oak Ridge the following year.

Dubbed the “Secret City”, Oak Ridge was constructed for the Manhattan Project and became the location of the Clinton Engineer Works: the site responsible for enriching uranium-235 at the K-25 and Y-12 plants, and producing plutonium at the X-10 plant.

As the only person officially authorized to take photos at these top-secret sites, Westcott created a historic archive of over 15,000 images documenting the city’s construction, operations and daily civilian life. So secret was his work that armed guards stood at the entrance to his darkroom.

While Westcott snapped images of the vital work that went into creating the first atomic bomb, it is perhaps the candid portrait he took of Manhattan Project colleague Julius Robert Oppenheimer that became his most famous.

Oppenheimer (1904-1967) was the principal scientist and scientific director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory (codenamed Project Y) from 1943-1945. Often referred to as the “father of the atomic bomb”, he was responsible for overseeing the research and design of the first nuclear weapon.

At the end of the war, Westcott took another of his iconic shots. On August 14 1945, then-President Harry S Truman announced victory over Japan (V-J Day) just days after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, over the city of Nagasaki.

As Oak Ridge residents packed Jackson Square to celebrate the announcement, many of them held up newspapers featuring the headline “War ends". Westcott immortalized the profound moment with his camera, with the photo later becoming known for the monumental newspaper headline visible.

Shortly after the US dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima (06 August 1945), the government allowed a selection of Westcott’s Secret City photos to be published to share the story of the Manhattan Project with the American people.

However, it wasn't until the years following 1945 that a significant amount of his work became publicly available – and subsequently recognized as the official visual documentation of the role that Oak Ridge played in the development of the atomic bomb.

After the war, Westcott continued his career as the official government photographer in Oak Ridge, covering the transition of the Secret City from wartime production to post-war atomic research.

He worked for the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and its successor agencies (ERDA and the Department of Energy) until his retirement in 1977.

Wescott died in 2019 but this month, following years of fundraising led by the Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation Association (of which Wescott’s son-in-law, Don Hunnicutt, is vice president), a statue of the late photographer was unveiled.

The statue was erected outside the Oak Ridge History Museum, which displays a series of Westcott’s photographs of the city and its atomic history. You can watch the unveiling of the statue below.

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It's the nightmare every photojournalist knows. You're at the scene of a major news event, something violent and fast and chaotic, but when it's over you're not sure you captured it. Jack Thornell knew that feeling better than most. 

On a Mississippi highway in June 1966, the Associated Press photographer heard the blast of a shotgun and scrambled out of his car, clutching his camera. But when the dust settled, his felt not relief, but dread. He feared his rival had a picture of the gunman and he didn't. He thought he was going to be sacked.

He wasn't. He won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for photography. Last week on April 23, he died in Metairie, Louisiana, aged 86, following complications from kidney disease. Photojournalism has lost one of its most significant witnesses.

The picture he didn't know he had

Here's some context to that Pulitzer-winning shot. Its subject, James Meredith, had already made history in 1962 by becoming the first Black student to enrol at the University of Mississippi, doing so under federal protection amid riots that killed two people. In June 1966 he launched what he called a March Against Fear: a solo walk through Mississippi to encourage black people to register to vote. It was, by any measure, an act of enormous bravery.

Thornell, then 26 and a relatively recent hire at the AP's New Orleans bureau, was assigned to cover the march. He and a rival photographer were sitting in a car by the roadside on US Highway 51 near Hernando when Aubrey James Norvell stepped out of the undergrowth and opened fire with a shotgun.

In the chaos, Thornell photographed Meredith on the ground at the highway's edge. Arms outstretched, hands flat on the tarmac, his head turns to look directly at his attacker, who's visible at the left of the frame, half-hidden in the ditch. It's not clear whether Meredith is still falling or pushing himself up. That ambiguity is part of what makes the image so powerful. It catches a man in the suspended, terrible moment between being shot and understanding that he's been shot. A second photograph shows Meredith grimacing as he drags himself to the road's edge.

Thornell didn't know he had any of this, though, until he developed the film. In fact, was convinced his rival had the gunman and he had nothing. Instead, Thornell had captured one of the defining images of the civil rights era.

A time of struggle

Thornell spent 40 years at the AP, from 1964 to 2004, and the civil rights struggle ran through his career like a thread. On his first day at the New Orleans bureau, he covered the integration of a Mississippi Gulf Coast school. He also captured the burned-out station wagon belonging to three civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County in 1964; the Selma-to-Montgomery march; and Martin Luther King Jr. attending demonstrations in Memphis, the week before his assassination. 

Later, Thornell photographed King's family at the open casket, an image he obtained by clambering over church pews after arriving late; an act of professional desperation he was instantly ashamed of. "I was shaken when I left there," he said later. "I had my eyes on the floor because I knew everyone was looking at me for my despicable behavior. But I didn't leave without the picture."

That line tells you who Jack Thornell was as a photographer. He was frightened, often. He was sometimes reckless. He was frequently uncomfortable with what the job demanded. But there was one fear that overrode everything else. "The greatest fear for me," he said, "was coming back without the photograph."

An accidental career

Much like Raghu Rai, who also passed this month, Thornell stumbled into photography by accident. The US Army, through a clerical mix-up at Fort Monmouth, sent him to photography school instead of radio repair training. He didn't know an aperture from a back focus when he arrived. He left with a trade that would define his life.

His son Jay said that only in later years did Thornell begin to appreciate what he'd documented. The stress of the civil rights beat, the deadlines, the physical danger, had made it hard to step back and see the weight of what he was witnessing. By the end, he was signing prints for admirers and telling the stories behind his most famous images to his granddaughter. 

The nightmare of the Mississippi highway, it turned out, had produced something that would outlast almost everything else from that day: the image of a man on the ground, looking his would-be killer in the eye. Not bad for a picture he was sure he'd never got.

There's a certain kind of photographer who never really retires: they just keep shooting, until they can't any more. Raghu Rai, who died yesterday aged 83, was that kind of photographer, as I noted in my obituary. And when his family laid him out at Lodhi Cremation Ground in Delhi on Sunday, April 26, they made sure everyone knew it.

Resting on his chest was a Nikon Z8, fitted with a Z 24-200mm zoom, its lens pointing skyward one last time. Beside it sat a small yellow box of expired Kodak ColorPlus 200 film, with a Best Before date of May 2017. Together, these three objects were as eloquent as any photograph Rai ever made.

The camera that tells a story

The Nikon Z8 is a telling choice. It’s not a relic or a prop, but a current professional tool: a high-end mirrorless body built for speed, durability and flexibility in the field. It can shoot up to 20 frames per second in RAW (and faster in JPEG or reduced-resolution modes), with advanced autofocus and video capabilities that reflect how far camera technology has evolved since the film era in which Rai began.

It’s certainly a long way from the manual cameras of his early career. The celebrated Magnum photographer moved to digital in the early 2000s, and the Z8 represents the modern endpoint of that transition: a camera that combines high performance with a relatively compact form factor compared to flagship DSLRs. Not lightweight in absolute terms, but streamlined enough to support a more mobile way of working.

The Nikkor Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 VR mounted on the front reinforces that idea. It’s a versatile all-in-one zoom, covering focal lengths from wide-angle to telephoto without the need to change lenses. While not Nikon’s fastest or most specialised optic, it’s well suited to photographers who prioritise flexibility and discretion over outright speed—allowing them to respond quickly to unfolding situations without drawing attention by swapping gear.

Together, the camera and lens suggest a practical, responsive approach to photography: one that values readiness and range over excess equipment, and that reflects the realities of working in unpredictable, fast-moving environments.

The film that tells another

The Kodak ColorPlus 200 is a different kind of object entirely. It’s an entry-level colour negative film, long known for its affordability and wide availability, particularly in markets like India where it became a staple for everyday photography. With a sensitivity of ISO 200, it’s best suited to good daylight or well-lit conditions, producing relatively fine grain and a warm, slightly saturated colour palette.

For years, it was one of the most commonly used films for casual and family photography, the kind people picked up from high-street shops, kiosks and travel outlets. Even as digital took over, stocks like ColorPlus didn’t disappear entirely, and in recent years film has seen a modest resurgence among younger photographers.

The roll placed beside Rai was expired, which adds another layer of meaning but isn’t quite as clear-cut technically as it might seem. Expired film can lose sensitivity and shift in color balance over time, especially if not stored in controlled conditions, but it often remains usable. Some even seek out expired stock for the distinctive effects it can produce.

In that sense, the film doesn’t simply represent an obsolete medium. It points to an earlier way of working—one shaped by limited exposures, delayed feedback and a different relationship to risk—while also acknowledging that these materials continue to have a life, however altered, beyond their intended span.

Habits worth keeping

The image of those objects, camera and film, resting together on white cloth among marigolds and roses, is already circulating widely, and it deserves to. It captures something true about how Rai worked and thought.

He wasn't nostalgic for the past. He embraced digital without ceremony and never romanticised the darkroom. But he knew that habits formed in the age of film – patience, economy, refusal to fire endlessly – were worth keeping. He said as much last year, advising young photographers not to chase Instagram followers by shooting endlessly, but to attach meaning to every frame.

A camera for the future, a roll of film for everything that came before. It's not a bad way to be remembered.

A memorial for Raghu Rai will be held on May 2 at the Chinmaya Mission Centre on Lodhi Road, New Delhi, at 6pm.

It started with a donkey.

In 1962, Raghu Rai was a civil engineer on a break, visiting his brother, photographer S Paul. He borrowed a camera, pointed it at a donkey staring straight back at him, and discovered two things in quick succession: that he couldn't get close enough without the animal bolting, and that he was perfectly willing to spend three hours in pursuit of a single frame.

When the donkey finally stood still, Rai got the shot. His brother sent it to The Times in London, which published it and paid enough to cover a month's living expenses. "I thought, 'This is not a bad idea, man!'" Rai later recalled. He never went back to engineering.

That story tells you almost everything about Raghu Rai. The patience. The stubbornness. The instinct to get closer. The refusal to settle.

Century-defining work

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the architect of modern photojournalism and co-founder of Magnum Photos, saw an exhibition of Rai's work in Paris in 1971 and was sufficiently impressed to nominate him for membership six years later. To be championed personally by Cartier-Bresson was as close to a Papal blessing as photojournalism offered. Rai became the first Indian photographer to join.

He spent the next five decades earning the compliment. His assignments took him to the Bangladesh Liberation War, Operation Blue Star and the Bhopal disaster, as well as into the inner circles of Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama. He produced more than 18 books on India and served three times on the jury of the World Press Photo.

One of his shots became one of the defining images of the 20th century. In 1984, a Union Carbide pesticide plant in the central Indian city of Bhopal leaked toxic gas overnight, killing an estimated 22,000 people and injuring hundreds of thousands more. Rai's photograph from the aftermath shows a dead child's face half-buried in the earth, eyes closed, as if sleeping. It reduces an almost incomprehensible industrial atrocity to a single, unbearable human detail; it's the image most people picture when they hear the word Bhopal.

A life in recognition

The honors accumulated steadily. India awarded him the Padma Shri in 1971 for his coverage of the Bangladesh Liberation War, one of the country's highest civilian distinctions. In 1992, he was named photographer of the year in the United States, for a National Geographic essay on wildlife management in India. The French government made him an Officier des Arts et des Lettres in 2009, and in 2019 he received the Académie des Beaux Arts photography award. He also served twice on the jury of UNESCO's International Photo Contest and spent a decade as director of photography at India Today, where his picture essays became the talking point of each issue.

His work appeared in Time, Life, GEO, The New York Times, the Sunday Times, Newsweek and the New Yorker. Exhibitions of his images travelled to London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Prague and Sydney. A retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi in 1997 cemented his standing at home.

There was also, tucked into the middle of this towering career, a rather good anecdote: in the spring of 1968, Rai visited the Maharishi's ashram in Rishikesh at exactly the moment the Beatles arrived. He was there as a staff photographer for The Statesman; they were there looking for enlightenment. It's the kind of assignment that reminds you just how much history one photographer can stumble into.

The invisible man

What made Rai exceptional wasn't just his eye: it was his method. In later years he described shooting with a single camera and zoom lens, no camera bag, no conspicuous gear, no stylish clothes. "I merge with them," he said of the people he photographed. "No one is saying, 'Here comes a photographer!'"

For anyone who's ever struggled to get candid, unguarded images, there's a lesson here: kit matters far less than the presence you project. Rai understood that a bag full of lenses can be a barrier, a signal, a way of announcing yourself before you've raised the viewfinder. He stripped all that away and walked invisible through some of the most charged moments of the 20th century.

Photography in the Western tradition has tended to treat India as subject matter: exotic, colourful, other. Rai treated it as home. He was born there, knew its complexity intimately and spent his career deepening that knowledge rather than simplifying it for outside consumption. That's a rarer and harder thing to do than most critics acknowledge.

Raghu Rai died on Sunday, April 26, 2026, in Delhi, aged 83, after a two-year battle with cancer. Photography has lost one of its most important figures.

A British fine art photographer and adventurer has etched his name into the history of photographic expeditions by setting a new record for completing the Cape to Cape journey, a 20,000km overland route from Norway to South Africa while capturing it all on camera.

Johns Balsdon led a team of 6 adventurers from Nordkapp, Norway – the most northerly point in Europe to Cape Agulhas, South Africa, the most southerly point in Africa in 28 days and 8 hours, shaving 5 hours off the previous record of 28 days and 13 hours set by a Canadian duo 42 years earlier.

The team crossed 25 borders and braved a range of challenging terrains, from snow-covered forests in Finland to the deserts of Namibia and Western Sahara, with temperatures in the extremes ranging from -28°C to +48°C across the 4-week journey.

In setting the new record, Balsdon’s crew also became the first to complete the Cape to Cape route via West Africa, to finish it with two vehicles driving as a convoy and the first to do so towing a trailer.

Breaking the previous record was one thing, but Balsdon and his team did so while also capturing footage of the entire journey on camera, which will be developed into a feature film about the expedition later this year – also a world first.

Balsdon is the man behind Always Look Twice, a fine-art photographic brand with a view of capturing the natural world via a slow, intentional approach. He says the coming feature film, touted for release in the Autumn, will embody this philosophy while highlighting the vast range of landscapes the crew encountered.

“This was the hardest thing I have ever done, and at times I genuinely questioned whether it was worth it. But the journey concentrated the human experience in almost every sense — visually, emotionally and creatively,” commented Balsdon in a press release.

He added: “Being taken so far beyond my comfort zone for such an extended period taught me an enormous amount about myself, and brought a new clarity to how and when I want to document the countries we passed through.”

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National Geographic was my photography bible long before I ever knew what kind of photographer I would become. As a young boy, I would pore over its pages with a kind of quiet awe, completely absorbed by the way it seemed to treat photography not just as illustration, but as something sacred. Every issue felt important.

Every image had a purpose. It was a publication that oozed class, dedication, and above all else, an unwavering belief that photography mattered. To me, that was everything.

My subscription came through my grandmother, who was a photojournalist herself and understood exactly what those pages could do to a young, impressionable eye. She told me that National Geographic would help me learn how to really see a photograph in front of me, and she was absolutely right.

It taught me that a great image was never just about what was in the frame, but how it made you feel, what it revealed, and what it asked you to stay with for a little longer. Looking back now, that advice was one of the greatest gifts I was ever given.

The truth is, National Geographic helped shape my earliest dreams of becoming a professional photographer. It planted the idea that photography could be more than a hobby or a passing interest. It could be a way of documenting the world, of telling stories, of preserving lives, places, and moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

Without that early boost, I genuinely do not know whether photography would have entered my life in the same way. Then again, who am I kidding? With a grandmother who was a photojournalist, a mother who was a journalist, and a father who worked as a newspaper printer, I am surprised I was not handed a camera before I could walk.

Like so many things in life, though, time moved on, and the dream evolved. That National Geographic subscription came to an end, and with it, that particular chapter of youthful ambition faded into the background.

My focus shifted, my career took shape, and photography became less about dreaming and more about doing. Sports photography became my bread and butter for many, many years as a professional, and I threw myself into it fully. It was fast, demanding, exciting, and it gave me a career I am deeply proud of.

But even while I was making my living in sport, I think those early National Geographic years never really left me. They were always there in the background, quietly influencing the way I thought about images and their relationship to story. Because what National Geographic taught me was not just how to admire a great photograph, but how a sequence of pictures could build a narrative, deepen emotion, and create a fuller understanding of a subject. In many ways, it was my first education in visual storytelling.

Now, after moving on from professional sports photography and finding myself writing about photography while making the odd picture or two in the documentary and street genre, life has taken on a funny kind of symmetry.

More than 20 years after that first subscription, I have subscribed to National Geographic once again. Opening that first issue after all this time was a strangely emotional experience. It was as though all those old dreams came flooding back at once, reminding me of the excitement, wonder, and ambition that publication first sparked in me.

The remarkable thing is that it still feels utterly unmatched. Yes, there are superb photo books out there, and they absolutely have their place. But for me, there is still nothing quite like sitting down with National Geographic and losing yourself in its glorious photography, paired with excellent stories from cover to cover.

It remains one of the few places where image and written word still seem to exist in perfect harmony, each elevating the other. In an age of endless scrolling and disposable content, that feels more valuable than ever.

Will this mean I chase that old dream again and try to document something worthy of National Geographic? Who knows. I will leave that to the universe to decide. But what I do know is this: my photographic eye is being trained once more by the very publication that first gave it direction.

Perhaps that is enough for now. Or perhaps, just perhaps, it is the beginning of something else - a few more personal photography projects, stories I have always wanted to tell, and a return to the kind of seeing that made me fall in love with photography in the first place.

An army may appear as a single, unified force, moving in sync and defined by discipline. But behind every identical tunic is an individual, each with their own story, motivations and identity.

Two years ago, Norwegian photographer Glenn Røkeberg set out to tell these stories in what would become an immersive, long-term project documenting the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment (HCMR) – the oldest regiment in the British Army, responsible for the personal protection of the Royal Family.

“I guess you could say that one of the main ambitions was to honor the individual in a great regiment,” Glenn explains. “It’s always about celebrating the individual, and I think everyone deserves that.”

Beyond the uniforms

The Mounted Regiment is one of the most recognizable units in the British Army, defined by ceremonial precision and centuries-old tradition. But Glenn was less interested in spectacle than in what lies beneath it.

“Once I started to meet the people, not on parade but going about their daily duties, I started to see them as the individuals that are the building stones of the regiment.”

By stepping away from formal displays and embedding himself in everyday routines, he was able to capture something rarely seen: the human side of a regiment often perceived as a single entity.

“I didn’t really give people much direction. I just wanted them to feel comfortable… then I took the pictures,” said Glenn.

The cameras and their role

Working primarily with a Nikon Z8, he was able to capture the fast-moving, unpredictable nature of cavalry life, including horses in motion, training exercises and ceremonial rides. Alongside this, he used a Hasselblad 500-series film camera, reserved for more controlled, contemplative portraits.

The Hasselblad, a camera he has owned since 1987, carries personal as well as aesthetic weight. Shooting film slowed the process down and encouraged a more deliberate engagement with his subjects, mirroring the project’s deeper aim of connection.

“I would never shoot people in a way that would not be to their advantage… I’m always trying to make people look good,” Glenn said.

Why black and white

The decision to present the work predominantly in black and white is central to the book’s impact. Rather than emphasizing the regiment’s iconic scarlet uniforms, often reproduced in tourist imagery, Glenn stripped away color to focus attention on the people beneath them.

Among those Glenn encountered was Captain Elizabeth Helen Godwin, to whom the book is dedicated. Captain Godwin passed away in 2025, and her sense of duty left a lasting impression. “She wanted to give back to her country… I deeply respect the values,” said Glenn.

The Mounted Regiment reframed

Glenn’s book challenges how we see military institutions. What appears, at first glance, as uniformity and tradition is revealed to be something more complex, a multitude of individuals, each contributing to something much bigger than themselves.

“You don’t really see the individual, you see just a force,” Glenn reflects.

Through a combination of intimate access, thoughtful photographic choices, and a commitment to humanizing his subjects, Glenn has reframed the HCMR as a collection of people rather than a symbolic military force.

Trusted Guardians: Inside the Mounted Regiment, a black-and-white photographic study of the HCMR, is available to buy at bookstores in London, England, and online through Amazon.

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There's an unsettling irony at the heart of the biggest photography auction story of the year. The prints now estimated to fetch between $100,000 and $150,000 at Phillips in New York show men covered in mud, carrying sacks on their backs in a vast open pit mine in Brazil, earning almost nothing. These photographs document misery, back-breaking labour and forgotten lives. Yet now they are among the most coveted objects in the art market.

Welcome to the world of Sebastião Salgado, who spent more than four decades making images the world needed to see, and who passed away in May last year. His estate, and the collectors who believed in him, are now watching his work command prices that reflect just how singular his vision was.

Phillips is presenting Sebastião Salgado: A Life's Voyage, the largest single offering of his work ever presented at auction. 30 signed photographs, spanning four decades, are being offered across an online sale (until April 10) and a live auction in New York (April 11).

Why this sale is different

The phrase "lifetime print" is thrown around a lot in collecting, but it matters here more than usual. Every lot in this sale is a print made during Salgado's lifetime and signed by the man himself. Now that he is gone, no more will follow. That reality is already being felt in the market, where demand for his work has reportedly intensified sharply since his death.

The two centerpiece portfolios tell you everything about Salgado's range and ambition. Gold Mine, a portfolio of 20 prints, documents Serra Pelada in Brazil, where in the mid-1980s up to 50,000 men worked a single open pit with little more than their bodies and basic tools. The images look like something from antiquity, or from a nightmare, and yet they are photos taken in living memory. 

Elsewhere Kuwait: A Desert on Fire, making its auction debut, documents the efforts of international firefighters battling the blazing oil wells set alight during the Gulf War. The estimate on the Kuwait portfolio alone is $60,000-$80,000.

Economist turned photographer

It's worth remembering that Salgado did not pick up a camera until his late twenties. He trained and worked as an economist, and only began photographing seriously after relocating to Paris in the early 1970s.

That background matters: his photographs are never merely beautiful, though they often are. They carry an analytical intelligence, a sense of systems and structures and the forces that grind people down. He understood what he was looking at, and it shows.

That combination, of documentary rigour, extraordinary compositional instinct and a genuine humanitarian impulse, is precisely what elevated his work beyond photojournalism and into the permanent collection of global visual culture. His images in this sale span subjects as varied as the mountains of Ecuador and the oil fields of Kuwait, the Antarctic ice and the railways of Bombay. Yet all are instantly, unmistakably Salgado.

What photographers can learn

The obvious lesson is that commitment compounds. Salgado did not make a career from a single iconic image. He made it from decades of patient, costly, sometimes dangerous immersion in the stories he believed the world should confront. The portfolios in this sale were not produced by a photographer chasing trends.

A second lesson is about the prints themselves. In an era when most photography is consumed on a screen and forgotten within seconds, the physical, signed, archival print remains the object that holds value, both cultural and financial. For photographers still deciding whether darkroom craft and editioned printing are worth the effort, the answer here is fairly unambiguous.

Salgado co-founded Instituto Terra with his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, planting millions of native trees to restore degraded land in Brazil's Atlantic Forest. He restored a landscape as well as documenting one. That instinct, to repair as well as to witness, may be his most remarkable legacy. The auction prices are simply the market confirming what many photographers already knew.

Sebastião Salgado: A Life's Voyage runs as an online auction at phillips.com from 2-10 April, with the live auction in New York on 11 April 11. Viewing is open until April 10 at 432 Park Avenue, New York.

It’s one thing to capture pictures of rapidly-moving animals using a mirrorless camera with blazing-fast burst mode, it’s a whole other ball game doing it with a cumbersome glass plate camera that, on average, could take three frames per minute.

Well, that’s exactly what official British Army photographer, John Warwick Brooke, did during WWI.

Stationed on the Western Front, when not attending the more horrendous affairs of the conflict, behind the lines, Brooke photographed cavalrymen galloping their horses at speeds you would imagine to be way too fast for cameras of the day.

The exact camera Brooke used to photograph his four-legged subjects was never recorded, but it was almost certainly either a Goerz Ango Anschutz (C. 1911) or ICA Minimum Palmos (C.1909), models used by other official British Army WW1 photographers.

These cameras were both medium format and captured images by exposing a 9 x 12cm glass plate coated with a gelatin emulsion to light entering through the lens. They featured a fixed f/3.5 and f/4.5 lens respectively and a maximum shutter speed of 1/1200.

When you consider the technical limitations of these cameras – especially the less-than-stellar 1/1200 maximum shutter speed – and the speed at which the horses would’ve been charging at, you’ve got to don your hat to Brooke’s skill.

Taking a closer look at his images, I can’t see any distortion either. Although I can’t be sure that the images haven’t been digitally restored in any way.

John Warwick Brooke’s vast portfolio of images depicting horses during WW1 is proof that what matters more than high-end specs is the person behind the camera.

Of course, having the latest tech in your camera makes a difference, but if Brooke could frame galloping horses with a glass plate rig, then there's hope for the rest of us.

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During the war, Brooke also shot what I think is probably the most tense series of images ever, snapped just before a group of soldiers went over the top into No Man’s Land.

Here's a good thing to remember the next time your autofocus hunts in low light, or your memory card fills up at the wrong moment. The photographers who pointed a camera at armed conflict 160 years ago had to coat a glass plate with volatile chemicals, load it into a hefty wooden camera not far off the size of a small trunk, expose it for several seconds, then develop it in a darkroom wagon before the emulsion dried. Usually within ten minutes.

This is the context worth holding in mind as the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC announces the acquisition of 35 photographs documenting America's Civil War: a collection it describes as marking "a seminal moment in the history of photography".

This wasn't the first use of photography to capture a war: British photographer Roger Fenton had taken images of Crimea in 1855, including a famous shot of cannonballs which is the subject of historical controversy (there are claims he arranged them, rather than shooting as he found). However, that trip was a relatively brief, single-photographer expedition, whereas the American Civil War took things to another level: years of systematic documentation by multiple photographers working across the entire theater of the conflict.

Who made them, and how

The collection includes work by three photographers whose names deserve to be as well known as Henri Cartier-Bresson or Ansel Adams.

Alexander Gardner, a Scottish-born photographer who had worked under Mathew Brady, produced one of the collection's centrepiece images: a wide-angle view of Abraham Lincoln's second inauguration in March 1865, taken on the steps of the Capitol just weeks before Lincoln's assassination. It's an image of real historical weight, captured with kit that would challenge most photographers today, even under studio conditions.

George N. Barnard, meanwhile, accompanied General Sherman's army through the South, capturing the destruction left in its wake with a precision that is almost architectural. And Andrew Joseph Russell – employed directly by the Union Army as an official photographer – made images of railway construction, shattered bridges and supply lines that read now as both technical record and unintentional art.

A sobering lesson

When you look at these shots, remember: none of them had a light meter. None had a zoom lens. Depth of field was seriously constrained. Yet the images in this collection demonstrate a compositional instinct that holds up completely against modern standards.

The placement of a cannon in a trench with a tented camp stretching into the distance. The formal dignity of a group portrait of Union officers, swords in hand. The structural geometry of a collapsed bridge being repaired by workers who stand along its edge like a frieze.

It's astonishing, really. This was an era in which photography stopped being a portrait studio novelty and became a way mass audiences could understand events they had not witnessed themselves. And it's sobering to realise that function has not changed, even if the technology behind it has.

Why this acquisition matters

We're used to hearing about museums acquiring paintings, sculptures. But when they acquire photographs – and particularly when they frame them as primary historical objects rather than illustrations of other events – it genuinely matters for the medium's standing.

The National Gallery already holds significant photographic collections, but this acquisition, made through a combination of gifts and private donations, substantially deepens its holdings of early US photography. It arrives alongside more than 140 other photographs spanning the 20th century, including work by Ilse Bing, Florence Henri and Sebastião Salgado, suggesting that the institution is making a serious, sustained commitment to photography as fine art rather than documentation. Long may this continue.

Personally, the mark of a good photo is how it makes me feel, and one of the most emotionally stirring images I’ve ever seen was taken by John Warwick Brooke during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Brooke was an official photographer with the British Army on the Western Front during WW1, and the image in question depicts the tense moment before a unit of his compatriots leaves the relative safety of their trench to raid the German front line at Thiepval.

The men pictured were from the Scottish 26th Infantry Brigade, and the way the scene is composed portrays the angst they were surely feeling. And unlike many WWI images, which were staged for propaganda, this scene is real.

The most gripping aspect is the immersive angle from which Brooke took the photo. I almost feel as though I'm crouched in the trench with the Scotsmen waiting for the signal to climb out into No Man's Land.

Adding to the strong sense of tension is the lack of color and context. History tells us that this photo was taken during WWI, but all we see is a group of tightly packed men in a claustrophobic space, seemingly waiting for something.

And while from the image alone we can’t be sure of what that something is, the mens’ huddled postures donned by protective metal helmets, and the entanglement of barbed wire just about visible at the end of their trench, hint at something sinister.

This image is a part of a small series Brooke snapped during the moments before the trench raid, with the following shots even showing these men going over the top. Unfortunately, the fates of the subjects have never been uncovered, which only tightens the knot I feel in my stomach when looking at it.

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Sometimes, I come across a photograph that puts all the emotions that I’m having trouble putting into words into pixels. That’s what happened when I came across an image from the No Kings protests held across the US on March 28. The photo? It depicts a protester dressed as the Statue of Liberty being arrested at a protest in Los Angeles.

The photo comes from the lens of Etienne Laurent, a photojournalist based in Los Angeles. In the image, a protester dressed as the Statue of Liberty in chains is being restrained with zip ties by police officers. More than 70 protesters were arrested in LA that day at a rally that organizers say brought more than 8 million protestors across the country.

There’s nothing technically unusual about the photo. The photographer framed the subject in the center, using a narrower aperture to blur the protestors in the background.

The reason the photograph is going viral is the symbolism that the photographer managed to capture in one frame. One Redditor called it “when political cartoons become reality.” Others described the image as “poetic,” while others described the image as a “generational shot.”

But what strikes me about this image in particular – among several images that the protestor appeared in – is not only the irony of someone dressed as the nation’s symbol for freedom being arrested. It’s that she’s smiling. The protestor, who later said that she’s been arrested four times at protests, was also photographed smiling while being led away in an image by Jill Connelly of the Associated Press.

The image is unsettling, but “unsettled” is one of many words that I could use to describe what I’m feeling as an American right now. Many of the changes over the past months feel opposite of my definition of what it means to be an American, and then I come across an image that is full of opposites. The symbol for freedom, being arrested. Someone being arrested, while smiling.

But I’m not just an American, I’m a photographer too. The photograph isn’t just a fantastic example of excellent photojournalism – it serves as a reminder that powerful photographs don’t need fancy camera tricks. Powerful photographs need a message – and the one in this photograph is clear.

Reports from the LA Times indicated that some journalists were “forcibly removed” – it’s unclear what Laurent went through to capture that photograph, but I think it’s one of the most powerful images from the No Kings protest that I’ve seen.

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We live in a world where video consumption trumps all other forms of media. From short-form social media footage and attention-grabbing YouTube clips to the Netflix flavor of the month, it’s video, video, video. As a photographer that can feel a little disheartening, especially if your worth as a creative lives and dies by your Instagram, which has long transitioned from a photo-first to a video-first model.

I won’t deny that the photograph’s relevance has diminished. But much like the written word, it’s far from obsolete. That’s because the photograph has something that video could never have, and rather ironically, it’s the very thing that has made video so much more popular: A still image is a still image – it doesn't move.

A moving image, then, stimulates the brain more, producing a more satisfying hit of dopamine. Pair that with rapid-fire short-form content and you’ve got an addictive loop that’ll have you ignoring the pins and needles and back pain while you ‘doomscroll’ on the toilet for 40 minutes. Has anyone ever done that while pouring through Bresson’s The Decisive Moment? Unlikely…

So how could moving imagery ever be at a disadvantage? Well, it moves, it’s fleeting. The creator has little control over the point at which the viewer engages or disengages with the work (they could miss the crux altogether). And while the viewer may be able to watch the video multiple times, pause it or rewind, it’s much harder to pour over the crux, the climax, the decisive moment.

A still image on the other hand affords both creator and viewer much more control. The former is precisely delivering the decisive moment to the viewer, short of walking away, they cannot avoid it. And the viewer is able to engage with the content more deeply. This has the potential to increase impact, remove ambiguity and encourage deeper analysis.

And the proof is in the pudding. When you think about defining moments in human history such as the moon landing or 9/11, as well as cultural icons like Marilyn Monroe and Bob Marley, you tend to think of photographs. Photography has become synonymous with pivotal moments and despite the rise and rise of video, I’d argue that imagery is still largely (not entirely) preferred today.

I recently watched Disney+ documentary Love+War, which is a film about Pulitzer Prize-winning conflict photographer, Lynsey Addario. When I think about the Ukraine war, I find it difficult to separate the many snippets of video that have been played over and over on the news and social media. But Lynsey’s harrowing photograph of four dead Ukrainian civilians, which was published on the front page of The New York Times, is etched in my mind.

The same can be said for the attempted assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Pennsylvania. Video footage was repeated on the news, ad nauseam, but interestingly, it’s the photograph by Evan Vucci of a bloodied Trump, fist aloft, surrounded by Secret Service agents and framed against the Star-Spangled Banner that has endured. Why? Because that was the decisive moment and Vucci's camera immortalized it in a way that the video footage simply cannot. You cannot help but remember it.

And that’s the power of a great photograph. It reaches out, grabs the viewer by the lapel and shakes them. There’s no waiting for the impact, the impact is instantaneous and it lasts as long as the viewer lets it. A video can provide more context, it can take the viewer on a longer, arguably more intricate, journey, but the photograph is the knockout blow.

I’m not suggesting that photography is superior to video, but I am making it clear that photography is in no way inferior. We need both forms of media. But in this ever-changing AI-infused world where people have become more cynical of imagery than ever, professional photographers must be protected at all costs. The photograph, the still image, the single frame is arguably more important now than it ever has been before.

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During my years as a photojournalist, I’ve taken a number of photos with unlucky timing – eyes squinting, sour expressions, tongues hanging out – the same expressions that you’ll sometimes get when you pause even Netflix at the exact wrong moment. A person’s face can’t be frozen in a flattering expression 100 percent of the time, making some odd expressions inevitable.

That’s exactly why a recent headline caught my eye. According to reports in the Washington Post, the US Pentagon excluded photographers from two press briefings this month, reportedly for “unflattering” photos of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

A Defense Department spokesperson denied those claims, saying photographers were restricted for space reasons and that the press was welcome to use the official photographs from the meeting that the Pentagon shares after each briefing. Video cameras were still allowed into those briefings.

But, the allegedly unflattering photos are just another example of rising tensions between the current administration and the media. A number of journalists left their desks at the Pentagon last fall over being required to sign a new agreement – the New York Times has filed a lawsuit calling the agreement a violation of the First Amendment right to press freedom. Last year, the Associated Press – including photographers – was banned from White House events over not using the term "Gulf of America."

I’m not a political journalist, having shifted from local news reporting to tech reporting more than a decade ago. But as a photographer, I know how common those unflattering, ill-timed photos are. Typically, the photographer (or perhaps an editor) goes through the photos of the event and selects the best options.

But “best” of course, is subjective. In photojournalism, “best” doesn’t mean the most flattering images, but the images that convey the tone and emotions of the event. Look no further than the Napalm Girl photograph or the World Press Photo Contest to understand that the most impactful images in journalism are rarely smiling faces.

A photojournalist’s job is to capture what happened. But just as written journalists choose which words to use, photojournalists choose how to compose the shot and when to press the shutter – and sometimes the shutter is pressed on an expression that wouldn’t be featured in a flattering portrait, but may speak volumes about the emotions during the event.

Unlike perhaps, say, a glamour portrait photographer, a photojournalist’s job isn’t to make the subject of the photos look good. A photojournalist’s job is to capture a representation of what happened. I’m not sure what photographs were allegedly “unflattering,” but the furrowed brow and solemn expressions that I’ve seen from the event feel far more appropriate for a briefing on the war in Iran than, say, a smiling portrait.

The “unflattering photo” fiasco reminds me of the response to photographer Christopher Anderson’s close-up portraits of the Trump cabinet published in Vanity Fair in December. The collection of photos included extreme closeups with no attempts to hide pores and makeup smears, which the internet described as everything from “diabolical” to “done dirty.”

A photograph’s job isn’t to be pretty. A photograph’s job is to communicate without words, and when the topic isn’t pretty, why should the photographs themselves be?

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I recently sat down to watch the National Geographic documentary Love + War on Disney+, a powerful film that follows the life and work of renowned conflict photojournalist and Pulitzer Prize–winner Lynsey Addario.

What I expected was an interesting documentary about a photographer working on the front lines of global conflict. What I didn’t expect was how deeply it would affect me.

The film made me cry, it made me angry, and perhaps most surprisingly of all, it made me believe in photography all over again.

You can view the official trailer below:

Above: watch the official trailer for the film

Addario’s work has taken her to some of the most dangerous and devastating places on Earth. Through the documentary, we see glimpses of Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iraq, and other war-torn regions where civilians live under the constant threat of violence. Yet what struck me most was not just the danger she faces, but the responsibility she carries. Her camera is not simply documenting events - it is bearing witness. It is recording the reality of human suffering, resilience, and survival in places many of us will never see.

Watching Love + War is not easy. The images and stories it reveals are raw, confronting, and often heartbreaking. As viewers, we are forced to confront the human cost of conflict: families torn apart, cities reduced to rubble, and lives permanently altered by forces far beyond their control. At times, it made me angry - angry at the senseless destruction, angry at the suffering inflicted on innocent people, and angry at how easily the rest of the world can look away.

But the documentary also reminded me why photography matters so profoundly. In an age where artificial intelligence can generate images in seconds and manipulate reality with frightening ease, there is something deeply authentic about real documentary photography. A war photograph is not just an image - it is evidence. It is proof that something happened, that someone suffered, that a moment in history existed beyond propaganda or political narrative.

Conflict photography carries a terrifying weight because of this truth. The camera becomes a witness to humanity at its most brutal and most fragile. Photographers like Addario walk into environments most of us would run from, not because they seek danger, but because the world needs to see what is happening. Without those images, war becomes distant and abstract. With them, it becomes impossible to ignore.

That is what makes Addario’s role so vital. Through her photographs, the realities of war reach audiences across the globe. Her work cuts through the noise and forces people to confront stories that might otherwise remain hidden. The documentary shows that conflict photojournalists are not simply observers - they are messengers, carrying the truth of these events back to the rest of the world.

By the time the credits rolled on Love + War, I felt emotionally drained. The film had shaken me, challenged me, and reminded me why photography remains one of the most powerful forms of storytelling we have.

It made me cry. It made me angry. But most importantly, it made me believe photography matters - because in a world increasingly filled with artificial images, the courage to document reality still matters more than ever!

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Disney+ is also home to a remarkable collection of photography and exploration documentaries, particularly through National Geographic, offering viewers a chance to experience powerful visual storytelling from some of the world’s most talented photographers, filmmakers, and adventurers.

The life of a war photographer is fraught with danger. Much like combatants, they too experience the devastation, needing to be near the action to tell the stories.

While I certainly believe photographic stories from conflict zones play an important role in educating the wider world on the ghastly nature of war, especially its futility, I struggle to see how they are worth dying for.

Brent Renaud (1971-2022) would probably have disagreed. Over a career spanning more than two decades, the renowned US photojournalist and documentary filmmaker covered many danger zones, including the Iraq War in 2006 and the immediate aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in 2010.

Above: see the official trailer for Armed only with a camera

Renaud took a boots-on-the-ground approach, embedding himself in military units and local communities, seeking out the true stories before the facts became twisted. This relentless pursuit to humanize crises led him to Ukraine to document the refugee exodus which ensued in the early days of the Russian invasion in 2022. Tragically, he was killed there.

Now, a HBO documentary produced by Renaud’s brother and longtime collaborator, Craig Renaud, chronicling the late filmmaker’s life has been nominated for an Oscar at the upcoming 98th Academy Awards, which will be announced in Hollywood on March 15.

Armed Only With A Camera: The Life And Death Of Brent Renaud, was released late last year and, in graphic detail, covers how Renaud met his end near the city of Irpin, close to Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.

Unlike combat cameramen who operate in the thick of the fire, Renaud’s focus was typically on the noncombatants caught up in the fray. Yet, when he died, he was headed towards the fighting in an unmarked civilian vehicle and, in the final moments of his life, unexpectedly found himself on the front line, when he was caught in a deadly ambush.

However, Renaud would’ve known he was putting himself in serious peril. After all, he wanted footage of the Ukrainians fleeing the Russian advance, and the fighting in the area had been going on for some three weeks by then.

Of course, any journalist volunteering to put themself in this kind of situation wants to get the most gripping footage, but I don’t think his documentary would’ve lost any journalistic rigor had he’d stayed behind the lines and waited for the refugees to reach him.

Moreover, Ukrainian soldiers holding the Russians at bay could’ve helped provide the most graphic details when they rotated out of the firing line. And in an age of wearable action cams, some of them may have even filmed it themselves.

I have the utmost admiration for war photographers and documentary filmmakers like Renaud, daring and caring enough to put themselves in harm's way to give a voice to those affected by conflict and hold its instigators to account.

But as a fellow journalist, if anything, his death is a reminder that there are no stories more important than your life. It also reaffirms my belief that stories are infinitely more powerful if you are around to share what didn’t make it into the published version.

We’ll never know if Renaud questioned his decision to come to Ukraine in the final moments of his life. I doubt it as, if you watch the documentary, you’ll discover just how hectic they were.

I’d like to think his years of experience enabled him to maintain some level of composure and not become completely overwhelmed by fear. However, with his vehicle being riddled by automatic weapons, it’s difficult to imagine.

Brent Renaud now figures among the list of legendary conflict photojournalists who sadly lost their lives on the job, standing among giants such as Robert Capa (1913-1954) and Dickey Chapelle (1919-1965).

He leaves behind a monumental legacy, not only as a documentary journalist but as a human being who preached compassion and lived with such devout purpose.

In achieving this, though, Renaud paid the ultimate price – a price I think no war photographer or filmmaker should ever be willing to pay, regardless of how important the story may be.

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For photographers navigating the challenging world of long-form documentary work, a new award has emerged with both serious clout and a meaningful purpose. British photographer Laura Pannack has won the inaugural Tom Stoddart Award for Excellence, securing £5,000 ($6,700) toward completing her project and a book deal with GOST Books.

The award, organized alongside the long-established Ian Parry Photojournalism Grant, attracted 184 submissions from 47 countries in its first year; impressive numbers suggesting that photographic community has long been waiting for this kind of support.

Pannack's winning project, The Journey Home from School, documents the perilous daily commute of children in Cape Town's Cape Flats. But what sets this work apart isn't just strong documentary photography; it's the collaborative, multimedia approach that judges praised for its "depth of collaboration" and "subtle and layered" storytelling.

During a residency at A4 Arts Foundation, Pannack ran poetry and lo-fi photography workshops with NGOs, youth clubs and schools across Cape Town's suburbs. In partnership with organizations including Project Hope, Where Rainbows Meet, and the New World Foundation, she worked in areas including Manenberg, Lavender Hill, Vrygrond, Athlone, Heideveld, Bridgetown, Langa and Mitchells Plain. 

The resulting project combines analogue photography with poetry, drawing, painting and collage created by the young people themselves; a creative dialogue that judges felt offered genuine insight into adolescent life, in a place where safety is never guaranteed. In short, this was documentary photography as creative partnership, rather than pure observation.

Passion for psychology

It's typically captivating work from Pannack, a highly regarded British social documentary and portrait photographer based in London who's known for her intimate, research-led, and long-form projects, often focusing on youth. 

Her distinct photographic style blends a passion for psychology with creativity, always striving to build a deep, genuine connection with her subjects. This dedication to time, trust and understanding as key elements means many of her projects develop over several years, allowing for a shared experience that results in highly empathetic and truthful portrayals.

More broadly, her work is driven by self-initiated projects that explore themes of love, vulnerability and the transition into adulthood. She often uses analogue film, valuing the organic, unpredictable nature and the depth it lends to the texture and light of her images, and her photography has been exhibited worldwide, including at London's National Portrait Gallery and Somerset House.

What the award offers

The new award, meanwhile, offers something increasingly rare: meaningful support for long-form documentary work at a time when traditional editorial commissions have largely evaporated. The £5,000 grant and guaranteed book publication provide both practical support and professional validation.

Its founding honours Tom Stoddart, the British photojournalist who died in 2021 after a five-decade career covering some of the late 20th century's defining moments including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the siege of Sarajevo and the 2003 Iraq invasion. His archive stands as a visual testament to modern history, and this award reflects his lifelong commitment to supporting photojournalism.

Executive director Harriet Logan, herself a 1992 Ian Parry Grant winner, says Tom Stoddart "would be immensely happy" about Pannack's win. For photographers who remember Stoddart's uncompromising work (he famously said photojournalists should "bear witness") this award continues that legacy in practical terms.

Stuart Smith of GOST adds: "‘We were very impressed with Laura’s submission due to the depth of collaboration she had with her subjects. This, coupled with her unique eye, makes for a subtle and layered project and publication." 

As part of the award, Pannack will work with GOST Books in the coming months to edit and sequence the photographs, artworks and text, with the opportunity to travel to Italy to see the book go on press next  year. 

When documentary photographers arrive to cover a conflict, they usually have somewhere to go home to afterwards. But Alena Grom has been photographing the aftermath of Russian occupation in Bucha and Irpin because these destroyed Ukrainian cities are her home.

Her series Stolen Spring, which won her the title of TIFA Photographer of the Year 2025 along with double gold in the People/Portrait and Portfolio/Fine Art categories, documents women who have endured the violence and misery of occupation. But these aren't the standard images of war photography.

Grom stages her subjects amid the ruins with a formal precision that transforms documentary into something more complex; portraits that sit somewhere between evidence and art.

Historic influences

This distinctive approach comes from an unexpected source: Polish photographer Michael Nash's images of Warsaw's ruins during the Second World War. Grom found resonance in how Nash captured destruction not as spectacle but as a backdrop for a spirit of human persistence.

Grom's 21st-century women, in turn, stand in front of bombed-out buildings, surrounded by rubble and twisted metal, dressed in ways that assert a sense of normality against surroundings that deny it. The spring of the title refers to the season that passed unnoticed during occupation; time stolen along with homes, loved ones and portions of lives that can never be recovered.

What makes this all particularly pointed is Grom's own displacement. Born in Donetsk, she was forced to leave in April 2014 when conflict erupted in Eastern Ukraine.

She settled in Bucha near Kyiv in 2017. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, she became a refugee for the second time. After Bucha was retaken from the Russians, she returned to find her neighborhood transformed into the kind of wasteland she'd already fled once before.

This double displacement informs every frame. Grom's lens captures internally displaced persons from Donbass and Crimea who are experiencing their second tragic spring; people who, like her, have watched their lives destroyed twice.

Importantly, her portraits acknowledge this layered trauma without wallowing in it. Her subjects meet the camera with expressions that resist easy categorization: not quite defiant, not quite defeated. Having visited Ukraine myself since the full-scale invasion, I'd say this feels highly representative of the population at large.

It's also important that, by staging these portraits rather than catching spontaneous moments, Grom is giving her subjects agency. They're not victims caught unaware by a roving lens, but participants in creating an image that will represent their experience.

The careful compositions – often centered, symmetrical, with the subject placed deliberately within the destruction – contributes to a careful balance between tragedy and hope.

Art or documentary?

For some, Grom's methodology might seem too controlled, too constructed to qualify as documentary. But I'd argue this is actually a fair reflection of her subjects' new reality. Because in truth, everything about life after occupation is staged.

The attempt to maintain routine in rubble-strewn neighborhoods; the performance of normalcy amid ongoing trauma; the constant internal battles between what was and what is...

Overall, Stolen Spring achieves something documentary photography often struggles with: the representation of ongoing trauma without reducing subjects to their suffering. That's not an easy trick to pull off, but it helps that Grom is not an outsider documenting someone else's tragedy. She's photographing her neighbors, people whose displacement mirrors her own.

In a press release, TIFA's program director Hannah Lillethun notes that this year's winning images "show the power of photography to tell stories that transcend boundaries".

But to my eyes, Stolen Spring does something more specific than that. These pictures portray what happens when the photographer cannot transcend boundaries…. because she's trapped within them.

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Few photographs have shaped public consciousness quite like The Terror of War – better known globally as Napalm Girl. It is an image that has transcended journalism, becoming a visual shorthand for the human cost of conflict.

And on November 28, Netflix releases "The Stringer: The Man Who Took The Photo", directed by Bao Nguyen, and produced by Fiona Turner. This is the same documentary that first screened at Sundance in January 2025, with additional edits to reflect the response to the revelation about the photograph's authorship.

This two-year-long investigation is a chance for us to delve deeper into one of photojournalism's most contested and emotionally charged stories, as renowned conflict photographer Gary Knight and a small team of journalists embark on a quest to trace the real identity of the elusive stringer.

The photograph at the center of a debate was captured on June 8, 1972. It shows nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc, fleeing a misdropped South Vietnamese napalm strike, her skin burned, her expression etched forever into our collective memory. The picture won the Pulitzer Prize and World Press Photo of the Year in 1973, and its authorship remained virtually unquestioned.

After half a century, this all changed. Headlines resurfacing around the camera used to photograph the scene – long believed to be a Leica M2, and later, challenged to possibly be a Pentax – but more explosively, around the authorship itself.

This release is an updated version of Bao Nguyen's documentary "The Stringer" – a film that originally set off shockwaves by challenging the authorship of the photograph. It presented evidence suggesting that the image may not have been taken by Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photographer Huỳnh Công "Nick" Út, but instead by Nguyễn Thành Nghệ, a Vietnamese stringer working for AP in 1972. As a response to "The Stringer," AP and the World Press Photo conducted investigations; you can read the full story here.

Netflix's "The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo" highlights a landscape rattled by doubt, contradiction, and emotion. What makes this even more intriguing is that its narrative includes a testimony of a former Saigon photo editor, a man who says he has been plagued with a secret related to the image for 52 years.

The Netflix documentary gives us a chance to weigh new testimony against decades of established history, and perhaps to reflect more deeply on the often overlooked contributions of local journalists whose work is frequently buried beneath geopolitical narratives.

Regardless of where you stand on the authorship question – or whether you believe it will ever be fully settled – Napalm Girl remains one of the most influential photographs ever taken.

And on November 28, I'll be glued to the screen. Because "The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo" promises to add more layers of understanding to this extraordinary photograph's journey – and this is perhaps the closest we'll ever come to understanding the moment behind the moment that changed everything.

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There’s something about great filmmaking that speaks to photographers in a way nothing else does. When I’m not out shooting, I’m usually glued to a screen - drifting between Disney+, Netflix, Paramount+, and, admittedly, falling down more YouTube rabbit holes than I care to admit.

If it’s a documentary about photographers, a behind-the-scenes look at cinematography, or a beautifully crafted film from a director I admire, I’m there. Video is an extension of the same creative obsession: light, story, emotion, craft. And this Black Friday, it’s suddenly become far more affordable to feed that obsession.

Paramount+ is leading the charge with one of the best streaming deals of the season, offering 50% off both monthly and annual plans when you sign up before December 1st. Standard drops to $29.99 for the first year (regularly $59.99), while Premium is priced at $59.99 for the first year (regularly $119.99).

For a platform packed with high-quality filmmaking, sharp originals, and blockbuster hits, it’s a hard offer to ignore. I’ll be honest - its photography documentary section is small, but the documentaries it does have are beautifully shot, and the cinematic quality of its major films and series keeps me coming back. Tulsa King, starring Sylvester Stallone, has become my new guilty pleasure; the direction, pacing, and cinematography are far better than anyone expects from a mob drama on streaming.

But if there’s one platform that truly understands the power of visual storytelling for photographers, it’s Disney+. I’ve just finished watching National Geographic’s Photographer, and it’s nothing short of outstanding. The docuseries follows a selection of photographers as they travel the world, capturing extraordinary moments across conservation, conflict, culture, and the quiet, unseen corners of humanity.

It’s raw, emotional, and beautifully crafted - the kind of filmmaking that reminds you why images matter, and why photographers put themselves on the line time and time again. For anyone who loves documentary craft, it’s essential viewing.

Disney+ is also joining the Black Friday madness with a sizeable 44% saving on its annual plan. And it’s worth remembering that Disney now owns Hulu and National Geographic, not to mention its unbeatable library of Disney classics, Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar - perfect for the kids when you’re not wrapped up in your next documentary binge.

In the US, new and eligible returning subscribers can also grab the Disney+ and Hulu Bundle (with ads) for just $4.99 per month for 12 months, saving more than $95 across the year.

For creatives, photographers, and filmmakers, Black Friday isn’t just about gear. Sometimes it’s about inspiration - and right now, inspiration is cheaper than ever. If you’re anything like me and love spending hours studying the craft of image-making from every angle, this is the perfect moment to subscribe, binge, learn, and indulge.