Tim Burton is probably the only person who could get away with using a monster's mouth as the entrance to an art exhibition. You know him for his films Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Of all film director-producers today, Burton probably has the most singular vision: one of whimsy, gothic gore and hallucinogenic fictions.

Tim Burton on the set of Corpse Bride (Derek Frey)

But Burton has been an artist his whole life. Well before Beetlejuice and Batman, he was escaping into illustrated fantasy worlds as a child in Burbank, Calif. To celebrate his career, New York's Museum of Modern Art has curated a major retrospective exhibition, opening Sunday.

The exhibition contains hundreds of creations from throughout Burton's career, including little-known short films, sketches of unrealized projects from his days at Disney and seven new pieces, created just for the show.

MOMA asked Burton to produce a trailer for the retrospective and, in collaboration with Mackinnon & Saunders, the animation and puppeteer firm that helped with Corpse Bride, he produced this little short. Learn about the making of it on MOMA's site.

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A well-recognized foot soldier in the Civil Rights movement died Wednesday in Birmingham, Ala. James Armstrong marched at the head of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March. The Army veteran carried the American flag across Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge as state troopers beat back marchers in what became known as Bloody Sunday. The struggle galvanized national support for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Witnesses said Armstrong dropped to his knees, but never dropped the flag during the clash.

James Armstrong on election day 2008. (David Gilkey / NPR)

Armstrong ran a Birmingham barbershop for more than 50 years, and was instrumental in civil rights activities there. He sued to integrate schools, and helped coordinate sit-ins and demonstrations.

"I was always involved, always going to jail, always in the newspaper." Armstrong told NPR's David Gilkey on election day 2008. (Watch the video above).

"If you want a voice, you want things to be better, you have to vote.....I don't come to work until I vote, makes no difference how long the line is. I vote first." He said he votes because older generations didn't have the chance. "I never heard my Daddy talk about voting. I never heard my Mama talk about voting," he said.

Year after year, Armstrong carried the flag during reenactments of the voting rights march in Selma.

Armstrong was 86. His family said he died of heart failure.

Has Google joined the ranks of Robert Frank and Helen Levitt? Can Google capture what Cartier-Bresson referred to as the "decisive moment"? Does Google have the cool, objective perspective that photojournalists strive to attain? Jon Rafman might argue so. By scouring the street view offered by Google Maps, he has culled dozens of image that Google can add to its art portfolio.

In 2007, Google dispatched a fleet of cars -- each one bearing a pole with nine cameras -- with the goal of documenting the streets of the world. The images taken by these cameras have been available on Google Maps for a while, but Rafman took it upon himself to find the views worth looking at.

"This very way of recording our world," he wrote in a recent article, "this tension between an automated camera and a human who seeks meaning, reflects our modern experience." Of course the Google camera is completely indifferent to what it sees -- which makes its fleeting images of burning houses or stolen kisses all the more intriguing.

Surprisingly, Rafman remarked, the Google car was met with delight as much as it was with dismay, which may be a testament to our time: we've become habituated to lost privacy and heightened surveillance -- sometimes we even welcome it. Here's NPR; what does your street view look like? Upload it to our Flickr group pool.

Google Street View of NPR

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How do you think these ghostly photographs were made?

David Maisel is a visual artist who recently completed a residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. It was there that he came across the museum's archive of X-rays, used in the process of conserving artwork. "The ghostly images of these X-rays," he writes, "seem to surpass the power of the original objects of art." And so he began to photograph them.

Maisel has photographed and scanned these X-rays to create an eerie body of work. The photos in his series, History's Shadow, explore his recurring themes of memory and excavation. According to Maisel, "They make the invisible visible, and express through photographic means the shape-shifting nature of time itself, and the continuous presence of the past contained within us." View his Web site to learn more.

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Alvarez, like many other National Geographic photographers, is known for photographing extreme, remote places. Much of his time is spent beneath the Earth's surface, exploring some of the most majestic cave systems on the planet. For this story, though, he spent his time above the ground. Way above the ground.

At a recent National Geographic event, Alvarez described the process of moving around this tsingy. He compared it to walking through New York City -- but instead of using the sidewalks, it's like climbing up one side of a building, then back down the other side, over and over again. "We were lucky to cover half a mile a day," Neil Shea writes in the magazine article.

This stone labyrinth, Shea describes, is a type of karst system, formed by porous limestone dissolved by water over time. "The exact processes that carved such an otherworldly stonescape," he writes, "are complex and rare." Only a few landforms like this exist in the world. And, surprisingly, this seemingly inhospitable place is home to rare plants and wildlife still being discovered -- such as the white-furred Decken's sifaka lemur. Fortunately, photographers like Alvarez can do the legwork to bring these surreal, remote landscapes to us with beautiful pictures.

To learn more, check out the article and photos on ngm.com, and view more work by Alvarez on his Web site.

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For Americans, the days of extreme cultural revolution have arguably subsided. The heyday of rock has come and gone, as have new wave and punk -- even post-punk -- and grunge. So it seems like we've gotten a lot of musical subversion out of our system. But, spin to the Earth's other hemisphere, and the musical revolution has only just begun. According to photographer Matthew Niederhauser, simply listening to rock constitutes rebellion in China.

Niederhauser, a freelance photojournalist based in Beijing, first stumbled into a dive bar called D-22 in 2007. It was there that he happened upon Beijing's underground music scene, and he has been documenting it ever since. His new book, Sound Kapital, shows this burgeoning scene in photos.

As he writes, "For now, China remains in a liminal state between the socialist idealism of old and a calamitous drive for wealth spurred by free-market reforms." And the rockers are rejecting both. It may be a small scene, but it's exploding. NPR's Zoe Chace went to see one of Beijing's rock bands in Brooklyn, and the line wrapped around the door. Tune in to All Things Considered today to hear the story, and check out Niederhauser's Web site to view more of his work.

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How many people can say with nonchalance, "I've had good friends of mine ... eaten by grizzly bears"? Paul Nicklen can, for one. He's a National Geographic photographer who was raised in Canada's Arctic and has spent the past 20 years documenting extreme polar regions.

Nicklen blends in with the surroundings during a whiteout in East Svalbard

Nicklen had a unique childhood. He grew up in a small and remote Inuit community on Baffin Island with no radio, no TV and no telephone. His idea of fun included lying in blizzards until his body went numb, building sleds and tending pet seals. It was a secluded youth -- and to anyone else, a bit extreme. But to Nicklen, it was as idyllic as childhood gets. "I was taking care of dog teams by the time I was 5," he tells NPR's Melissa Block. "It's just a completely different world, and ... I fell in love with it."

So it makes sense that his idea of fun today includes many of the same things: extreme temperatures, exploration and animal friendships. After a brief stint at the University of Victoria to earn a biology degree, Nicklen made a prompt return to Canada's Arctic, where he began a career as a nature photojournalist. "As I got to be older, as a biologist and photojournalist," he says, "I realized that these are the tools I can now use to protect the place that I fell in love with as a kid."

Polar Obsession (Paul Nicklen/National Geographic)

It's not an easy job. "In pursuit of the photographs I've taken over the past 20 years," he writes in the book's introduction, "I've crashed my ultra light airplane, fallen through the sea ice ... and suffered frostbite... I've also become lost in blizzards and been bitten by fur seals and elephant seals, charged by a grizzly bear, sniffed through the thin fabric of a tent by a polar bear."

All in a day's work. To Nicklen, though, it's worth the risk. "How are people supposed to care about the environment when they're living in a cement jungle?" he wonders in the interview. To make them care, he goes to extremes. Nicklen is on a mission to bring these remote habitats to those of us who may never see them, to make us care about the endangered polar ecosystems and the animals that inhabit them. His photos appear in a new book, Polar Obsession, published by National Geographic.

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Spirit, our poor little Mars rover, has been stuck in sand for the past six months with a broken front wheel. But NASA has a rescue plan. Joe Palca has the story on All Things Considered today, so be sure to tune in.

The fact that Spirit has even lasted this long is quite the technological marvel. Its mission was designed to last 90 days, but the craft will celebrate its six-year anniversary in January. In that time, Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, have captured more than a quarter-million images.

Jim Bell, professor of astronomy at Cornell, was in charge of primary camera photography for the Spirit and Opportunity rover missions to Mars and put many of those photos in a book, Postcards From Mars. He was the first to take on the painstaking task of editing, cropping and processing these images, many of which are larger than 100 megabytes! They provide a unique view of what life is like on Mars, even from a sand trap.

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According to Eliot Glazer, "Before the fanny packs and Andrea Bocelli concerts, your parents (and grandparents) were once free-wheeling, fashion-forward, and super awesome." It's hard to believe, but he has evidence. His photoblog, My Parents Were Awesome, shows vintage photo after vintage photo of parents before they were parents, back in the day, looking cool.

The photos are all user-submitted, and span about a century of photographic evolution. Glazer will be on All Things Considered today, so be sure to tune in. You can e-mail submissions to his site, or upload photos of your awesome parents to our Flickr group.

Hear a clip from the interview:

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As recently as last month, reading material on photographer Robert Bergman was really scarce. There were a few reviews of his 1998 book, A Kind of Rapture, floating around, but that's about it. So it was hard to figure out why, after nearly 60 years as a photographer, he is just now exhibiting his work -- and not just anywhere, but at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
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The opening of this exhibition last month, succinctly titled "Portraits, 1986--1995," yielded an explosion of material about Bergman. We now know that he was born in New Orleans, the son of an eye doctor; began photographing at a very young age; and has read pretty much every philosophy book under the sun -- or so it seems. But the questions still remain: Why has he been off the radar for so long, and what makes his photos special?

At first glance, Bergman might be easily labeled a street photographer. The people in his photos seem to be ordinary folks in ordinary environments doing ordinary things. And yet the more time you spend with them, the more they come to life.

For one, Bergman includes no information with his photos -- no captions, no titles, no names. These people are total strangers ... but they're presented in such an intimate manner -- tightly cropped around the face, eyes piercing through the lens -- that they somehow seem familiar. At the museum, the portraits are life-sized -- they loom and they disconcert. These are the people we pass every day on the street but never really look at. And here they are, staring at us.

It's easy to assume that these portraits, like a lot of those in street photography, represent a certain demographic -- and that there just might be an agenda behind it. But according to Bergman, "There's a housewife, there are three artists, there are two actors, an affluent owner of a bar, there's the son of a millionaire and the granddaughter of a billionaire." So much for stereotypes. His agenda, if he even has one, is simply to see people artfully.

Most of all, credit is owed to Bergman for technique. He has an unusual command of light, using only what's available -- from the hanging sun at dusk to eerie neon street lights. His personal printing process is both elaborate and time-intensive. And this particularity is precisely why we're only just now hearing about him: Bergman waited a lifetime for what he felt was the right moment to reveal his work. He waited for a book deal, waited a year for Toni Morrison to agree to write the introduction and waited 14 years for this particular exhibition to come together. A patient man, he's now "springing out of the head of Zeus like Athena," or in other words, bursting onto the scene. His work will be met with mixed reviews, but according to Bergman, "waiting pays."

His work is also on display at P.S.1, the Museum of Modern Art's Contemporary Art Center in New York City, where it will be up through January. It remains at the National Gallery through January as well. Tell us what you think. Worth the wait? Do you see familiar strangers?

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Clyde and Niki Butcher / www.clydebutcher.com

Greg Allen for NPR followed Butcher through the swamps, waist-high in water on the job. An intrepid documentarian, Butcher carries a large-format camera around the swamps on his back, like a time traveler hailing from the days of uncharted America.

Butcher is currently shooting photos for a project that will document the entire Everglades ecosystem, from the headwaters near Orlando all the way down to Florida Bay. He's working to turn that into a multi-media exhibit that will tour the country called, "The Everglades: America's Amazon." Learn more on his Web site.

Listen to Allen's profile here:

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Afghanistan is not camera-friendly terrain.

"Everything is either made out of mud, steel or rocks," NPR photographer David Gilkey explains over the phone. Setting one's camera down thereby invites an array of problems. And even if you could make the camera out of graphene, it would eventually get destroyed by dust, he says.

Lt. Brandon Currie (David Gilkey / NPR )

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Nonetheless, he's managed to keep the camera intact enough to send us the photos above - - an update on the Marines in 1st Platoon Golf Company. Though still patrolling Helmand River valley, with cots to sleep on and a shower, they are faring better than in July. Despite many close calls, they've managed to stay casualty-free. This has fueled some superstitious practices -- their leader, for example, refuses to shave his lucky mustache.

The cornfields that fill the farms of Helmand have proved to be a dangerous hiding place for insurgents' weapons.

"The Taliban or insurgents hide the weapons in the cornstalks, run to the corn piles, pull out an AK-47 and then put it back in and act like they didn't do anything," Gilkey explains.

As Gilkey took the photo of a Marine searching through the cornstalks in the gallery above, he says he could hear gunfire; another squad caught several insurgents taking weapons out of the corn and fired back.

If you missed Gilkey's previous audio slideshow on 1st Platoon Golf Company, you can find it here.

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Blended Nation/Mike Tauber and Pamela Singh

The husband-and-wife team of photographer Mike Tauber and co-producer Pamela Singh were intrigued by the post-Sept. 11 climate of anxiety and racism. Years later, the election of a bi-racial president would bring the topic of racial identity to the forefront of national conversation. Tune into the series to learn more. On Sunday's show, Hansen will also speak with Cheryl Quintana Leader, one of the subjects in the book, who is part Caucasian, Mexican, and Aztec Indian. See more photos on Mike Tauber's Web site.

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