Photographer and National Geographic Explorer Rena Effendi learned that a little-known species was named after her late father, a renowned butterfly expert. The discovery took her on a journey across war zones.

Despite the tightening of entry conditions for foreign journalists in Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power on August 15, 2021, the Iranian photographer managed to enter the country up until 2023. His images show youth deprived of a future and all forms of freedom.

The Lucie Foundation supports emerging photographic talent with vision and dynamic ideas that challenge and progress the art form of still photography. Part of its efforts is a scholarship program. Moreover, the foundation has revealed the winners of the Lucie 2023 scholarships.

“Our support of photography is overarching, from fine art to documentary and photojournalism as well as from digital to film-based works. Our objective is to support emerging photographers producing work that is at once gripping and original,” the foundation announced.

Izium, 9th of December, 2022 : Le Monde’s journalist Ariane Chemin and Guillaume Herbaut found a hundred letters sent by Russian students to Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, found, amidst empty vodka bottles, toothpaste tubes and soggy pillows, in a former Ukrainian police station once occupied by the Russian army.

The bunkers thus reveal themselves to be a culturally complex legacy, simultaneously singular constructions, which with their aesthetics have marked the architecture of the ‘900, but also monuments to human frailty, relics of an era marked by nationalist ideologies and oneiric dwellings.

More than 200,000 children and teens participate in patriotic camps and clubs in Russia, where they are taught national, military, and religious ideology; play sports; and practice weaponry—ultimately to be instilled with civic responsibility and, for some, to prepare for service in the Russian army. The web of programs, first started in the Soviet era, were reinvigorated following a Kremlin proposal entitled “Patriotic Education of Russian Citizens in 2016–2020,” which called for an 8 percent increase in patriotic youth and a 10 percent increase in Russian armed forces within the next decade.

Since 9/11, Peter van Agtmael has photographed in both the US and the countries that the US has been at war with. His new book, Sorry for the War, interrogates and implicates politicians and regular Americans in the violence and warfare that have torn up the Middle East for the past 20 years.

He has been interested in covering war since he was young, but how he interacts with it through photography has changed immensely over the past 15 years.

The Korengal Valley was widely considered one of the most dangerous postings in the US-led coalition’s war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Initially visiting the area alongside journalist Sebastian Junger for a Vanity Fair assignment, Tim Hetherington’s documentation of one U.S. Airborne Infantry platoon’s experiences, morphed into a two-year study that resulted in an astonishing array of work. It included traditional journalistic coverage of the Afghan war, a profound study of fighting men in the multi-screen multimedia project Sleeping Soldiers, a fly-poster exhibition, the book Infidel, and the feature documentary Restrepo – which earned Hetherington and Junger an Oscar nomination for best documentary.

By the time, Debi Cornwall landed in Algeria in May 2015, in search of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee, the first phase of her photography project on the prison camp was complete. She had visited the U.S. base in Cuba three times in the previous year, making photographs that strictly complied with the rules: No faces or full-frontal views of anyone on base, no sensitive infrastructure or communications facilities, no panoramas of the site, and so on. She pushed where she could, seeking fresh insight on the place, despite the restrictions. 

Homes make a city. More than buildings, roads, schools, markets, hospitals and shops, it’s homes and the people who live in them that create the life of a place. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria conquered Raqqa, which it named its first capital, and eventually the Iraqi city of Mosul, where it declared its caliphate, in order to control millions of those lives. Between these twin capitals, ISIS militants ruled with a level of cruelty and madness almost unknown in our time. It took a year of sustained combat to pry the two cities from their grasp. 

In October, 1914, early in the First World War, a Salient was born. The German Army came to a halt, just at the edge of the semicircle formed by the hills surrounding the Belgian town of Ypres. Satisfied with their position, the soldiers entrenched themselves, awaiting a more propitious moment to advance. The French, Belgians and British on the other side, took advantage of the pause provided by the Germans. They too seized the opportunity to improve their defence of the Flemish stronghold, which they had managed to retain at great cost to life. It was exactly in those few days that the Ypres Salient was formed. One hundred years later, on a rainy October day, I walked down a muddy track running alongside the Bellewaerde Ridge, just a few kilometres away from Ypres. They were the first steps of a long path, which led me to travel more than 1,000 kilometres over the area of the Salient.

Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings premiered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in March of 2018. Through more than 100 photographs, many of them never previously exhibited or published, the show explores the continuing influence of the American South on her work. In her essay Sally Mann: The Earth Remembers, Drew Gilpin Faust discusses the artist’s landscape photographs of Antietam, a site that more than a century ago, bore witness to one of the bloodiest battles in the American Civil War.

By the time Davide Monteleone and I arrived in Kiev last month, the Maidan had become a kind of living museum, an open-air theatre of dramatic but unfinished political and social change. Behind the barricades—made of paving stones, or chairs, or the carcasses of cars—people had built makeshift altars, with votive candles, incense, and framed pictures, to commemorate killed protesters where they had fallen. There was fresh-cut firewood stacked up to fend off the lingering winter; there were self-organized encampments, complete with night patrols, stoves, and tents; there were soup kitchens open to anyone who was hungry.

Landscape photographer An-My Lê is fascinated by military war exercises. “I think my main goal is to try to photograph landscape in such a way so that history could be suggested through the landscape, whether industrial history or my personal history,” she says. Lê discusses her return to Vietnam, where she grew up amid the violence of the Vietnam War, to photograph people’s activities, revisit childhood memories, and reconnect with her homeland, as well as her experience photographing military re-enactors, whom she found on the Internet. Unable to travel to Iraq to document current U.S. incursions in the Middle East, Lê worked with marines training at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California.