Think about where you are, this very moment — and imagine all that has happened there before now.

When I was in college in Tennessee, for example, my neighborhood was nicknamed "The Fort," because that's exactly what it was during the Civil War. How weird to think that where soldiers once fired cannons, students today are doing keg stands. And actually, I wouldn't have been shocked to see Civil War soldiers milling around the neighborhood; re-enactments were — and are — huge in the area.

That interests photographer Gregg Segal. "I travel a lot on assignment for magazines and had been increasingly disturbed by the growing sameness of America," he writes in an email. "Wherever I traveled, I'd see the same strip malls with the same Olive Gardens and Jamba Juices and Panera Breads, etc., and I wanted to say something about the erasure of the past and the homogenization of the landscape."

He had been reading Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic, a book about the South's sustained interest in the Civil War, and tracked down one of the book's key figures: Robert Lee Hodge, a "re-enactor, battle site preservationist and walking encyclopedia of all things Civil War," writes Segal.

Through Hodge, Segal met his cast of characters and, over the course of five trips to the South and Gettysburg, created this series of, for instance, soldiers camped out in front of Domino's.

"On a more abstract level, I'm interested in time," Segal explains, "and the unique capacity of the photograph to convey the past and present in a single image."

An L.A.-based commercial photographer, Segal is a prolific producer of personal projects like this one. Among many on his website is the one that shows superheroes at home — and "Remembered," a touching series about Alzheimer's. That fascination with memory is an obvious through-line of his work. So is a charming sense of humor and an affection for the absurdity of life.

100 Words is a series in which photographers describe their work, in their own words. Curated by Graham Letorney.

Arbai Barre Abdi was one of nearly 13,000 Somali Bantu refugees who were resettled throughout the U.S. beginning in 2004. I met Arbai that same year, when she and her four children were placed in Clarkston, Ga., directly from a refugee camp in Kenya. It is estimated that 1 in 3 of Clarkston's residents is an immigrant, and more than 60 languages are now spoken in this small Southern town.

This series of portraits began in 2006, when I started using my 4x5 camera to document Arbai's growing family on my weekly visits. For the past six years, I have had the privilege of bearing witness to their overwhelming spirit as they assimilate to American life, while still preserving the traditions of their culture.

Bryan Meltz is a documentary photographer based in Atlanta, Ga. From 2004 to 2006, Meltz worked on a PBS documentary chronicling the lives of several Somali Bantu refugees from Africa to America. This led to her current long-term project on refugee resettlement in Clarkston, Ga. You can see Bryan's work on her website and on FotoVisura.

If you want to know something about a teenage girl, start by studying her interior decorating choices.

"This is her private space where she can be herself," says Rania Matar over the phone. The photographer, who has two teenage girls herself, would know. She's spent the past few years working on her new book, A Girl and Her Room — documenting rooms around Boston, where she lives now, and Lebanon, where she spent her teenage years.

"People tend to look at the differences, but for me it was really about the similarities," Matar says. "This is Lebanon, and nobody would guess that," she says, referring to a blond Christilla, posing suggestively in her hot pink room — practically a reincarnation of the Marilyn Monroe poster that hangs behind her.

Matar recalls her teenage bedroom: orange paint, posters of French singer Johnny Hallyday, "stuff all over the walls," she says. One difference between her room and her Boston-raised daughters' was that Matar used to collect bullets and shrapnel.

"I grew up during the war," she says, referring to the years of civil strife that raged in Lebanon, "but I still had happy teenage years in some strange ways."

Many of Matar's photos from Lebanon were taken in refugee camps, and though the differences are obvious, the similarities really are striking. One photo shows a girl named Amal, at Shatila Refugee Camp in Beirut. She's in a hijab, but that doesn't say much. The Hannah Montana T-shirt and stickers obscure the lines between Massachusetts and Middle East.

The thing is: Although Lebanon, in many of these photos, could pass for the States, you probably won't find yourself thinking the inverse — that a Boston bedroom looks like Beirut.

But Matar doesn't lament what seems an undeniable "Westernization" of Lebanese teens. If anything, she celebrates the fact that girls will be girls no matter where they live.

Ideally, at a certain age, we grow more comfortable with who we are, and stop projecting who we want to be on walls and graphic T-shirts. But at that age, Matar says, "girls are very vulnerable ... even when they pretend not to be. They're trying to find who they are."

A friend of mine sent that sentence in an email, along with this photo, and I couldn't agree more. That's all.

Bill, if you're reading this, can we see your pix?

Yemen has been in the news more and more lately — and is now considered to be "the greatest external threat facing the U.S. homeland in terms of terrorism," investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill told Terry Gross on Fresh Air last week.

Bad news for just about everyone — except, perhaps, for the lizards on Socotra, a small archipelago off the coast of Yemen. Security issues have all but halted development on these four little islands that rank "among the world's most important centers of biodiversity," according to National Geographic's June issue.

Though I'd love to see it personally, I came across a lot of Socotra's surreal wildlife last month while doing a post about remarkable trees for Arbor Day. Among the stranger flora: gnarly cucumber trees, inverted-umbrella-looking dragon's blood trees, and desert roses, which writer Mel White describes as looking "as though a much taller tree had simply melted in the heat."

White says that the island has remained somewhat off the radar for centuries, though it has always been a pit stop for frankincense and sap from the dragon's blood tree — until recently.

"The number of endemic plant species (those found nowhere else) per square mile on Socotra and three small outlying islands is the fourth highest of any island group on Earth," writes White. "Every vista on Socotra, from the hot, dry lowlands to the mist-shrouded mountains, reveals wonders seen nowhere else."

But the view from many of those vistas now shows unfinished roads and abandoned construction — traces of development that started before the disruptions in Yemen. Who knows if it will pick back up when things settle down on the mainland? If, that is, they settle down.

Again, according to Scahill, we might have bigger fish to fry.

See more photos at National Geographic.

If you want people to see something, it's probably best to put it somewhere visible. For a long time, that might have meant the pages of Life magazine. Today, perhaps that means a place where passers-by can stop for a minute, or tweet a photo, or even listen to an audio guide just by dialing a phone number. Say, for example, in New York City.

That's exactly what you'll find if you happen to be ambling around 6th Avenue, in the windows of the International Center of Photography.

The unorthodox digital display — three mounted monitors running a looped slideshow — is a tribute to Gordon Parks, the first African-American staff photographer for Life magazine, who would have been 100 this year.

And although the installation is undeniably modern in contrast to the photos themselves, Parks might have approved of the idea.

"It's so Gordon Parks, in a way," says curator Maurice Berger. "He wanted to reach as many people as possible."

How do you sum up the life and work of someone like Parks — who escaped poverty in order to document it, who endured racism while photographing it, a writer-photographer-filmmaker whose work spans a huge swath of the 20th century?

It's next to impossible in this square-inch of cyberspace — and the ICP's window installation probably isn't meant to do it, either. It may be as simple as raising awareness.

"We want all the younger generations to know who this guy is," Berger says.

And who was he?

"He was a jack of all trades and, in a funny way, a master of all," says Berger. Case in point: On the Gordon Parks foundation website, you'll find photos of the civil rights movement and of poverty around the world — right next to glamorous fashion shoots.

He was a documentarian, "both of how far we've come and how far we need to go."

You can learn more about Parks in this 1997 interview, or on the Gordon Parks Foundation website.

Two levels below the noisy streets, in the building next to The New York Times, just past the leaky sewer and through the bomb-proof doors, lies what the newspaper affectionately refers to as "The Lively Morgue." Or, its archive.

By the numbers: It's 4,000 cabinet drawers of newspaper clips containing 1,126,000 items — and five to six million photographic prints and contact sheets, cross-referenced by card-catalogs made on typewriters, and amended by hand. It's seemingly infinite and old-school and plainly: Unfathomable.

The Times has begun sounding its depths — with their Tumblr devoted explicitly to archival photos. Being the antiquarian that I am, I visited a few weeks ago to see this archive in the dusty flesh — an inherently interesting story in and of itself.

And then I met Phil. The sole custodian of the dungeon's depths.

You may have heard of Dear Photograph, a website that invites readers to submit photos of photos — images from the past, set in the present. Over the past year, the website received thousands of submissions. In fact, enough for a book, also called Dear Photograph, which was released earlier this month.

Taylor Jones, 22, is the man behind the project. He came up with the idea last year while sitting at his parents' kitchen table. While flipping though a family photo album, he stumbled across a picture of his younger brother, Landon.

"It was his third birthday," Jones says. "He had a Winnie the Pooh cake, and I was sitting in the same spot my mom was when she took the original photo." Landon was also sitting in his same birthday seat.

So, Jones held up the old picture — taking care to line up kitchen cupboards just so — and snapped a photo. He posted it on his blog, and the rest, he says, is history.

"I'm a new-age nostalgic guy, I guess you could say," he says.

You can submit your photograph on Jones' blog.

The current issue of Oxford American magazine, known as "the Southern magazine of good writing," is nicknamed the "Visual South Issue." In its 100 under 100 list, the magazine identifies "the most talented and thrilling up-and-coming artists in the South." This is the final installment of our weeklong look at five of those photographers.

Susan Worsham describes her work better than I could, so in her words:

I photograph the landscape of my childhood, but through the lens of my adult self.

One of my muses, Margaret Daniel, is my oldest neighbor on Bostwick Lane, and one of the last threads remaining from my childhood, since all of my family has passed. ...

I can remember one particular time when I visited Margaret. I looked out of her large picture window and saw what looked like a nest or hammock of small red berries draped between the winter trees. I asked Margaret what it was. She answered, "Why, that's bittersweet. Bittersweet on Bostwick Lane."

Maybe that is what it means to me to be a Southern artist. Putting sugar in my tea to make it go down easier. Maybe not hiding the real taste, but being able to taste both the bitter and the sweet.

In the South it seems like there is a name, a history and a story for everything, just like in Margaret's house. She calls the flowers in her yard "Frannies" and "Mrs. Macs." ...

"Look at Esther growing in your old backyard."

My mother's name was Esther. She is referring to a camellia bush that my dad, who died when I was in the third grade, planted for my mom long ago.

In Margaret's kitchen, her homemade bread or ... chocolate chip cookies can be found baking, set to the same timer that she used to use ... in her old biology lab. The ticking sound is a reminder to me to appreciate every moment I have with them.

When I ask Margaret what it means to be Southern, she says: "It is just liking to keep what was."

(See Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV)

Of all the memorable photographs that came out of the Vietnam War, Horst Faas was probably responsible for more of them than any other photographer.

Faas, who died in Munich on Thursday at age 79, spent eight years in Vietnam for The Associated Press. He was willing to go anywhere no matter what the risks, and he was relentless in his pursuit of images that captured the war.

He won a Pulitzer Prize. He was badly injured. And he was a stern taskmaster who helped mentor countless photographers, both Vietnamese and Westerners.

He assembled some of the best photography from Vietnam in Requiem, a 1997 book about photographers killed on both sides of the conflict.

Having survived all those years as a combat photographer, Faas returned to Vietnam in 2005 for a reunion of the press corps 30 years after the war's end. He fell ill there, the result of a spinal hemorrhage that left him paralyzed from the waist down for the final years of his life.

Just dwell on this image for a minute or two, and you get a sense of the power of Faas' photos:

There's much, much more where this came from, in the full obituary.

The current issue of Oxford American magazine, known as "the Southern magazine of good writing," is nicknamed the "Visual South Issue." In its 100 under 100 list, the magazine identifies "the most talented and thrilling up-and-coming artists in the South." This week, we're looking at five of the photographers on that list.

We all have our ways of escaping the daily grind. We watch TV, or go for a run — or a drive. When Texas photographer Brandon Thibodeaux wants a break from the "constrained world of deadlines," he gets in his car and heads down Highway 61 to the areas around Mound Bayou — a black-majority area of Mississippi with a history as rich as the Delta soil.

PBS has the story of Mound Bayou, which, in short, goes like this:

Jefferson Davis, the president of the Southern Confederacy, had a brother, Joseph. And Joseph had a plantation. And on that plantation, a man named Benjamin Montgomery was born into slavery.

Montgomery managed the plantation until the end of the Civil War, when he bought it from Davis and built an autonomous community of freemen. Hard economic times ensued, and Montgomery sold it back — but his son, Isaiah, executed his father's dream: He bought more than 800 acres in the wilderness of northwest Mississippi and founded an independent black community called Mount Bayou.

"There is this elegance," Thibodeaux says of his wanderings through the area. "You might see the parking lot party, trailer, white-washed chapels — but when you venture off the road and into the communities, you realize there is a sense of pride. You see it in the family unit, in their ties at church."

The story of Mound Bayou gets complicated when you fast-forward to today. Most recent estimates put the population at around 1,900. And historic and cultural riches don't always translate in hard numbers: According to the U.S. census, about 35 percent of the population in Bolivar County lives below the poverty line.

So, while Thibodeaux may come here to escape his deadlines, plenty of Mound Bayou residents leave the city limits to find better work. The economic hardship is real, but that's not his focus. He's off duty and exploring, making friends and finding an appreciation for one enclave of people after another.

"There's so much fertile ground to explore," he says. "There's so much in your own backyard."

(See Part I, Part II and Part III)

The current issue of Oxford American magazine, known as "the Southern magazine of good writing," is nicknamed the "Visual South Issue." In its 100 under 100 list, the magazine identifies "the most talented and thrilling up-and-coming artists in the South." This week, we're looking at five of the photographers on that list.

How much does geography frame an artist's vision? It's hard to say; just ask Tammy Mercure.

"I don't think of myself as any particular kind of photographer, like a Southern photographer or a woman photographer," Mercure writes in our correspondence. "The South has very much shaped my photography, though."

Born in Iowa and currently teaching at King College in Bristol, Tenn., Mercure has a few ongoing documentary projects, including this one about tourist towns near the Great Smoky Mountains, a ridge that runs between Tennessee and North Carolina.

Mercure seems to shoot with a twinkle in her eye, which she keeps out for wryly humorous scenes — like people sitting at a park with their backs to the beautiful view. She also seems sincerely affectionate for what she captures in places like Pigeon Forge, Tenn., home to Dolly Parton's amusement park, and Cherokee, N.C.

"The pure spectacle of the towns brimming with shopping, all-you-can-eat buffets and pure entertainment stop some visitors from even seeing the nature up close and unmediated," her website reads.

She also explains that there are several things she appreciates: "The biggest is that the majority of the people I meet are really passionate about their 'thing,' whether it is NASCAR or a beauty pageant. I feel that they appreciate me for being into photography — and take the time to really show [me] something."

"I plan on living somewhere in the South for the rest of my life. The tea is sweet, and the weather is good for shooting every day of the year. And one can always find a live wrestling match every Saturday or just show up to Junior Johnson's house and get a hearty breakfast."

(See Part I and Part II)

The current issue of Oxford American magazine, known as "the Southern magazine of good writing," is nicknamed the "Visual South Issue." In its 100 under 100 list, the magazine identifies "the most talented and thrilling up-and-coming artists in the South." This week, we'll take a look at five of the photographers on that list.

Frank Hamrick controls the means of production: He shoots film. He develops it. He makes his own paper and prints. He works in series, and literally sews it all together in limited edition books. All by hand. There's an intense thoughtfulness, deliberateness and slowness to his work that you just don't see too often these days.

I mean, in response to a few casual questions, he sent me a four-page meditation. And I read every word of it.

"Chicken is chicken," he says, "but we all realize its taste will be affected by whether we fry it, broil it, bake it, grill it or microwave it."

Like most photographers, Hamrick has digital cameras — even an iPhone. But the chicken analogy is one way to explain why he mostly uses a large, clunky camera. Perhaps the equivalent of a long marinade and slow roast. (Not necessarily better than a quick fry, but certainly more complex.)

Hamrick was born and raised in Georgia, and is now an assistant professor at Louisiana Tech University. He has spent most of his life in the south, with brief interludes in New Mexico, where he received his M.F.A., and in Italy, where he taught a course. His photos are often about his immediate surroundings: family, friends, home, his garden.

"Leaving the South for a while to live in different places helped me better understand who I am as a person and what it means to be from the South," he says.

"Although," he continues, "I am not sure what being labeled a 'Southern artist' tells anyone, other than the fact that I am from and live in the South. [It] can generate more questions than answers."

But he's clearly OK with ambiguity. I mean, look at the photos. What do you get out of them?

"My photographs are not necessarily created to illustrate or provide answers," Hamrick says.

"If anything, I would like for my images to generate more questions. I do not see them as endpoints, but rather starting places where I give viewers ideas to ponder and allow room for their imagination to create the rest of the story."

Hamrick was nominated for the the magazine's list by Jim Sherraden of the famous Nashville letterpress studio Hatch Show Print — where Hamrick spent a few weeks in 2007. That's another thing Hamrick does: his own letterpress printing. That's the gravy on the chicken.

See more on his website.

(See Part I: Unseen Scenes Of Guantanamo)

The current issue of Oxford American magazine (known as "the Southern magazine of good writing") is titled the "Visual South Issue." In its 100 under 100 list, the magazine identifies "the most talented and thrilling up-and-coming artists in the South." This week, we'll take a look at five of the photographers on that list.

Christopher Sims used to be a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He would spend hours and hours each day looking at photos of war, he explains over the phone from his home in North Carolina, where he's an instructor at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies.

Although the museum's photo collection is one of the largest of its kind, Sims explains, "there were a lot of things that were missing, and that's because they were never photographed in the first place — or because they didn't survive the war."

Sims had that in mind during and after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I knew I didn't want to go to Afghanistan or Iraq myself because there were a lot of people already doing that," he says. "I was interested in finding, just like at the Holocaust museum, the places that there weren't photographs of. I was thinking of an archive for the future, and searching for images in the collection that other people weren't concentrating on."

That idea took him through much rigmarole and red tape to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — home to the American Naval base and its controversial prison, created during the Bush administration. Sims went once in 2006, and again in 2010.

"[Guantanamo Bay] holds a certain meaning to us," he says, "but we don't really know what the place looks like."

Because access to the prison is very limited for photographers, Sims focused on the scenes that are a backdrop to what happens on the base, rather than the people: the landscape, the architecture, the mundane details of daily life.

"You think Guantanamo, and you think its going to be a very high-tech, formidable prison system in a base that's sophisticated and up-to-date," he says. "The base as a whole kind of feels like a leftover from the Cold War. ... It's this very unique place — a U.S. military base in a communist country on a tropical island."

This peripheral approach to war shows up in Sims' other work, too. The photos in his series "Theater of War" were not taken in the Middle East, though it may initially appear that way. The images actually show "the fictitious Iraqi and Afghan villages on the training grounds of U.S. Army bases, places largely unknown to most Americans," his website explains.

As to whether or not he considers himself a "Southern photographer," Sims is somewhat on the fence. But the sound of his 1-year-old chattering in the background reveals a little something. "He's obsessed with horses," Sims says. His wife is from Louisville, Ky., and, accordingly, they just celebrated the Kentucky Derby this past weekend.

I can't remember exactly when I received the first flower email, but I do remember it was sometime in 2005.

At the time, I had no idea why my old friend Darryl Pitt had sent it, but I didn't think too much about it. A flower. OK. That's nice. But then the flowers continued to arrive day after day after day — and soon a modest digital bouquet turned into a meadow, and that meadow into a hillside of, as always, flowers.

There was no explanation attached to these emails — only that he was shooting exclusively in a garden he passed each day in Riverside Park at 91st street in New York City. No special effects. Just one man, one camera, one garden.

I was surprised, really, that he'd developed this passion for the botanical, because Darryl's photographic career was spent in the music world shooting for magazines like Rolling Stone, and album covers for artists like Ella Fitzgerald and Stevie Ray Vaughan. People, yes. Flowers, no.

Still, each day, I and a handful of Darryl's close friends opened our inboxes to discover another of his discoveries. A tight tangle of petals at dawn. A single blossom melting into darkness.

It recently occurred to me that it was no accident that these flowers started showing up when they did. As I mentioned, it was 2005. That was a significant year for Darryl, because it was when he learned this his good friend and client, renowned saxophonist Michael Brecker, was seriously ill. It turned out that Michael had myelodysplastic syndrome, or MDS.

MDS is actually a group of diseases that attack the bone marrow and blood, and for folks like Michael who contract the disease, the best shot at survival is to get a blood stem cell transplant from a matching donor. That is no easy task, and it's one that takes time — something Michael didn't have much of. So Darryl, along with Michael's wife, Susan, went to work at jazz festivals and concerts asking people to be tested and join the donor roll — if not to help Michael, than for someone else, somewhere else, suffering from the disease.

So why the flowers? It happened that early on in Michael's illness, Darryl took a trip to Death Valley, where there had been an extraordinary six inches of rain — three times more than the normal spring rainfall — and the result was an explosion of wildflowers. Suddenly the desert was alive with reds and yellows, purples and oranges. Darryl called Michael and, standing in that field hundreds of miles away, told his friend about the startling, tenuous beauty before him. Michael asked for pictures, but the photographer in Darryl refused. Flowers weren't his strength, and each time he tried to capture them, the image just didn't turn out right.

Back in New York, when Darryl was helping Michael prepare for his first hospitalization, Michael once again asked for photos of flowers from Death Valley and, once again, Darryl refused. It sounds kind of harsh, but really he just couldn't stand the fact that he'd give anybody, much less a really dear friend, a crummy photograph. What Darryl didn't know at the time was that Michael had planted a seed.

And one day, as Darryl was biking home, he noticed something he'd never paid any attention to before: a garden, with flowers. The next morning, he returned with his camera.

During Michael's hospitalization, a wall in his room filled up with Darryl's flowers, all taken from that same garden at 91st in Riverside Park.

Michael died in January of 2007. During that month, and in fact during much of that year, not many flowers showed up. But in the years since, they've returned. And now, once again, they are a daily occurrence. Sometimes a word or two accompanies them, but mostly not. Just a quiet meditation from the dawn or the dusk — an homage to the power of friendship and the beauty it inspires.