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Amid Nails And Mud, Oklahoma Neighborhood Pulls Together

It's been four days since the tornado blazed through Moore, Okla. And while the initial shock may be abating for some, the hardest part lies ahead for people who live there. Residents of subdivisions like Heatherwood, located about a mile east of Moore, are facing piles of rubble where their houses once stood. The question on their minds — after "Why?" — is "Now what?"

Photographer Katie Hayes Luke has been on assignment for NPR this week and gathered a few portraits of people in that neighborhood.

"I'd never seen destruction like that before," she says, "so walking into a wasteland at first was kind of overwhelming. ... They all seemed kind of dazed."

What was even more surprising, she says, was "how upbeat people are." Like Damon and Kristi Mabry, who somehow couldn't seem to stop smiling. That was partly because, Luke says, over the course of their brief conversation, about five volunteer cars drove by offering assistance.

"We talked a lot about ... the outpouring of assistance they've gotten," says Luke.

Her portraits show what — or rather, who — remains in the neighborhood. And for most, amid the rubble, it's a mix of fear, disbelief and resilience.

Have you ever looked at old family photos and wished you could be there? Share a gin and tonic with your great aunt on that awful floral couch — or find out what your dad and his buddies were laughing at? If you look closely at this photo (and only if you look really, really closely), you might notice that something is ... off. One person is not quite like the others.

Bootsy Holler and her grandmother Ruby

Courtesy of Bootsy Holler

Photographer Bootsy Holler first showed me this photo in person. It was in a little black-page photo album, served with a magnifying glass. I looked at it. She looked at me. I looked at it again. And she waited patiently for my reaction. I probably said something like, "Um, your family seems lovely?"

It wasn't until I saw the next photo that I realized what was happening.

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The original photograph of Holler's grandmother Ruby

Courtesy of Bootsy Holler

Holler is known among her siblings as the one who likes "old stuff." She has a big collection of vintage clothing — some of which belonged to her maternal grandmother, who was a seamstress. She's also the one who safeguards the family photos.

And it was during a photography class — while working on a self-portrait assignment — when she had the idea to combine the photos and the wardrobe. Holler found a snapshot she liked, picked an outfit from the same era, made a self-portrait — and, with the magic of Photoshop, went time-traveling to visit the woman who made the clothes: her grandmother Ruby.

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Bootsy Holler's self-portrait, which she later edits into the original photograph

Courtesy of Bootsy Holler

"My connection to her is really just through the fact that I have very similar skills to her — like the hands-on sewing skills," Holler says. "I feel a connection to her even though she passed away when I was 7 or 8."

Holler's series, Visitor, contains about 20 such instances of time travel — family photos in which she has inserted herself and sometimes her son. Her appearance changes in each photo — both her age and her looks — although in her mind, she is always just herself. In one photo, she's her mother's age. They look like they're ready to go to a sock hop. Maybe they're friends. Maybe they're sisters. In another photo, her mother is just an infant — and Holler looks on with her son.

It looks easier than it is. For each photograph, Holler has to position herself in a way that would naturally fit the scene. The lighting has to be perfect — as do the proportions. To say nothing of the sartorial selection. And up until now she has only explored her mother's black-and-white photos. Next she plans to start visiting her father's side of the family. And eventually, she'll go back to the future and dig into the color albums.

It's fun to imagine hanging out with her younger parents. But, Holler says, the project is just as much about spending time with them now — and gleaning stories about her family history that she would otherwise never know.

"It's opened up this whole relationship with my mom, about who these people are and the stories that go along with them. And, you know, we just don't do that anymore," she says. "You don't just sit and talk about stories anymore in photos."

April showers bring May flowers. But in this case, the blossoms are too small for even a bumblebee to see.

Engineers at Harvard University have figured out a way to make microscopic sculptures of roses, tulips and violets, each smaller than a strand of hair.

To get a sense of just how small these flower sculptures are, grab a penny and flip it on its back. Right in the middle of the Lincoln Memorial, you'll see a faint impression of Abraham Lincoln. These roses would make a perfect corsage for the president's jacket lapel.

Growing the gardens is similar to making crystals with a Magic Rock kit.

The flowers sprout up spontaneously when a glass plate is dipped into a beaker filled with silicon and minerals (specifically, barium chloride). Then Wim Noorduin at Harvard coaxes the salts to spiral and swirl into smooth, curvaceous shapes, like vases, leaves and petals.

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Sense Of Scale: Microflower sculptures row in front of the Lincoln Memorial imprinted on the back of a penny.

Courtesy of Wim Noorduin

He sculpts the stems and blossoms by slightly tweaking the environment in which the crystals grow. Lowering the temperature makes the petals thicker. Bursts of carbon dioxide send ripples through the leaves and blossoms.

The result is thousands of microviolets carpeting the surface of the glass plate.

"Every flower has a unique shape," Noorduin says. "It is very sensitive. If I just walk by the beaker in the lab, it changes the growth of these structures."

Noorduin has even seeded the crystals on the back of a penny, creating a garden of nanotulips on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

"It's a completely new world that you can make," he says. "And these flowers last — they don't go bad. Even after years, you can still see them."

Noorduin can add color to the flowers by mixing dyes into the solutions. But he still has to colorize the images with Photoshop because the electron microscope only takes photos in black and white. He tries to match the colors in Photoshop with those in the actual flowers, though. "Like the rose structure with the green stem," he says, "these are the real colors of the sculpture."

He and his colleagues describe the microgardening technique in the current issue of the journal Science.

So far, they've focused only on making aesthetically pleasing structures, but Noorduin says the technique could be used to make any complex shape or architecture you want — at an incredibly small size.

"It's a little bit similar to 3-D printing," he says. "Right now there are more options and varieties of shapes available in 3-D printing because it's 30 years old. We're just starting."

Eventually, he and the team at Harvard hope to use the method to create microelectronics, medical sensors and new materials for optics. "At this [size] scale, really interesting things happen with light," he says.

"When you look around you, nature can make very complex structures almost effortlessly," he adds. "Now we've demonstrated that we can make similar shapes by really doing very little, too."

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Boats line up to photograph this year's Teahupoo swell in Tahiti.

Courtesy of Ben Thouard

For nearly two decades, professional surfers have been flocking to Teahupoo, a small village on the southwest coast of Tahiti. The location seems obscure, but according to some, the waves there are legendary.

"It holds one of the most powerful and perfectly artistic waves in the world," writes Tahiti-based photographer Ben Thouard.

For a few years, he has been photographing an annual surfing contest that convenes there in August — and this year will be no exception. In anticipation, he has already started publishing photos to Surfer Mag.

For Thouard, the ocean came first, then photography. Born and raised in the south of France, he remembers spending every holiday and weekend on a sailboat with his father. His first encounter with waves was on a body board at age 8. After that, he says, "I could not stop thinking about waves ... I love the feeling of water moving and rolling. It's a different world underwater."

Eventually he got a camera but couldn't afford to buy underwater casing for it — a necessity if you are going to photograph in water. Fortunately, he did know about resin and fiberglass from fixing his surfboard — and so he built his own. With that he made his first trip to Hawaii, initiating a life of chasing waves around the world.

It was on a trip to Tahiti, Thouard says, that he fell in love again, this time with Teahupoo. He says it's "one of the best places in the world for surfing." And even though the island can feel isolating to visitors, Thouard says being a local gives him an artistic edge: "I can make unique images because of my knowledge of the island," he says. "I know the best angles."

But even for a pro, the job is dangerous and physically demanding; it takes hours in the water to make a good image. Thouard has been grabbed by waves and mercilessly thrust against reefs acquiring what locals call a "Tahitian tattoo." But for him it's all part of the challenge. After all, it's not just a job — it's a way of life.

Later this summer, he will be photographing the pro surfers as they wrestle Teahupoo's epic waves for a championship title. In the meantime, there is no shortage of photogenic material for him to work with in Tahiti. Until this summer's contest, you can see more photographs — like the ones included here from past competitions — on his website.

Pete Pin was born in Khao-I-dang, a refugee camp on the border of Cambodia and Thailand. Fleeing the infamous "killing fields" of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime, his family eventually resettled in Stockton, Calif., in the mid-1980s. What started with a single portrait of his grandmother has evolved into a deeply personal project that aims to explore the Cambodian diaspora.

His grandmother survived Pol Pot and the killing fields, and after having her portrait taken in 2010, she unexpectedly felt compelled to share her story. "I felt that my camera created this safe place that enabled the conversation to happen," says Pin. "The stories that my grandmother told me explained a lot about my family."

Pin is hoping to reach older Cambodians, but also younger generations who may not be familiar with their family's history and experiences under Khmer Rouge. His goal is to use photography to create an open dialogue within the Cambodian community.

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Pin's grandmother Duong Meas in Stockton, Calif., in August 2010; and a family portrait circa 1973, one of only two items Pin's family saved from before the revolution.

Courtesy of Pete Pin

"One thing that I learned ... is that a lot of people felt really traumatized during their stay in refugee camps," says Pin. He adds that violence and rape were common.

Pin recalled the story of an elderly Cambodian man who escaped atrocities in Cambodia, only to be confronted with enduring hardship in the camps.

"He witnessed a soldier shooting someone right in front of him and his wife. When you have suffered so much already and you come to this place of hope where you think you will be safe ... for many of the Cambodian refugees, it was a place where they lost hope."

"It's the responsibility of young Cambodians to shoulder the responsibility of capturing our stories for generations to come," says Pin. "If young Cambodians don't remember that past, then we are the literal manifestation of Pol Pot's attempts to erase Cambodia's history and culture."

Pete Pin's project, Cambodian Diaspora, is currently on exhibit at Montefiore Family Health Center in Bronx, N.Y., until July 29. See more of his work on his website.

Currently, more than 95 percent of Japan's racehorses are born and raised in the southeast of Hokkaido, an island in northern Japan. The region was known for its war horses until the early 1900s. The intensity of competition at the horse races increased to the point that the new motto is "Losers must disappear." Because of this competitive climate, about 90 percent of horses born with any kinds of defects are transformed into cat food, dog food and food for human consumption. Through this project, I hope to bring awareness to the life and use of horses in Japan.

Hajime Kimura is a Japanese photographer who was born in 1982. He studied at the Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo. Since 2006 he has been actively photographing in Asian countries, including China, India and Japan. He was most recently listed as an honorable mention in the FotoVisura grant for outstanding personal photography project. More of his work can be found on his website and on FotoVisura.com

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

Curators Note:

Contrast can refer to the balance of dark and white tones, or it can refer to a mode of storytelling (to compare and contrast). Here, Kimura weaves a narrative that aptly balances both forms, having a nearly sublime balance. Through highly contrasted black-and-white images, we are confronted with equal doses of nostalgia and peril, with sleigh rides and with the slaughterhouse.

In a poor city in a poor country on a poor continent, there is a group of people with a singular purpose: to look rich.

Or, rather, to look good — and to fully embody the suave, elegant style that a wardrobe of three-piece suits, silk socks, fedoras and canes might suggest.

They are called sapeurs or members of the Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes (the Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People). And when they go out, they turn the streets of Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo, into a fashion runway.

The sapeur style began as one of emulation.

"At the beginning of the 20th century, when the French arrived in Congo, the myth of the Parisian elegance was born among the youth of the Bakongo ethnic group," says Spanish photographer Hector Mediavilla, who began documenting the SAPE in 2003 and whose work is on view at the Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, Ore., until June 2.

Congolese men who worked for the French colonizers, or who spent time in France, began adopting that country's sartorial elegance and aristocratic affect.

Fast forward to present-day Brazzaville, where today's sapeurs drop big money on slick garb — a pair of crocodile shoes can cost between 1,000 euros ($1,300) and 3,000 euros ($3,900) according to Mediavilla — and cultivate an air of refined gentility amid their war-torn country's severe poverty.

According to the World Bank, 46.5 percent of Congolese live at or below the national poverty line. The country's per capita gross national income is $3,240, according to the World Health Organization — enough for one pair of crocodile shoes.

"For some [sapeurs] it is an obsession," says Mediavilla, who says the men he met work as electricians, in small shops or as marketing agents for fashion boutiques — hardly professions that support haute couture. "But they can also get [things] secondhand or buy from a friend, because not everyone is ready to spend such an amount of money on their clothes."

But it's not all about the conspicuous consumerism.

"Creativity is very important," says Mediavilla. "It's not only about spending a lot of money on the clothes, but also the way they speak, the way they move. ... It's a way of presenting their lives and being somebody in a society that doesn't give you many opportunities. ... It's about [being] confident in oneself despite the circumstances."

Sapeurs are also pacifists, says Mediavilla: "You have to be respectful to others. You cannot be aggressive."

Still, it's tempting to see the sapeurs' aspirational style as part of a legacy of cultural imperialism, a post-colonial legacy.

But Mediavilla invokes a phrase common among sapeurs — and one that is attributed to Papa Wemba, a rumba musician from Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) who popularized the culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s: "White people invented the clothes, but we make an art of it."

 

If something seems impossibly remote, you call it Siberia. And if Siberians want to make the analogy, they could call it Wrangel Island. About 90 miles off the coast of northeastern Siberia, the 91-mile-long island has been inhabited by some humans over the years — but has been home to a superabundance of wildlife such as polar bears, Pacific walruses and musk oxen.

In the May issue of National Geographic magazine, Hampton Sides writes about the Russian federally managed nature sanctuary. And images by Russian photographer Sergey Gorshkov show what the words can't.

In an interview on All Things Considered, Sides explains that Gorshkov made a fortune in the oil business before deciding to become a photographer.

"He lives in Moscow and has more money than he probably knows what to do with," Sides adds on the phone after the interview. "Some people have described him as an oligarch."

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Hampton Sides poses with a wooly mammoth tusk. According to National Geographic, scientists believe the island to be the last place mammoths lived before they went extinct.

Courtesy of Hampton Sides

But unless he could afford to hire a helicopter, these photos probably wouldn't be possible. Wrangel Island is prohibitively difficult to access — except by helicopter and icebreaker (not to mention all the required permits).

"This is a guy who has dedicated hundreds of thousands of dollars and so much of his time to getting these images right," says Sides.

Although Gorshkov had been to the island several times before Sides, the two traveled together for the purpose of the magazine story. For photographers and scientists, the draw to such an inhospitable place is that the island has remained unchanged in many ways for epochs. Traveling to Wrangel Island is like traveling back in time.

"You're looking at a kind of nature that has been ... largely this way since the Pleistocene time," Sides says. Plus, he describes Gorshkov as a lone wolf. "He likes to get away from humanity, and this is about as far away from humanity as you can get."

For aspiring photographers, Gorshkov's story might be inspiration. He didn't pick up a camera until his mid-40s.

"He's pretty fearless," says Sides. "Some of those images you just can't get unless you're right up there with these animals."

Like the images of musk oxen head-butting and polar bears denning. This is just a tiny selection of Gorshkov's work, but you can learn more about Wrangel Island in the National Geographic article and see more on Gorshkov's website.

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Haliotidae Haliotis shells collected by L.H. Snyder on Aug. 5, 1939, off an island in what is now Kangwon province in North Korea. Some Haliotis species are now critically threatened with extinction.

Courtesy of Diana Zlatanovski/Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology/View the entire typology here.

Diana Zlatanovski is a perfectionist — in the wonderful way that an anthropologist, photographer and museologist should be. She works with cultural artifacts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and has immersed herself in the significance of collections for a decade.

That time spent studying the intricacy of groups has inspired her photo series, The Typology: beautiful, highly detailed photographs of various collections — both the individual objects and the collections as a whole. (And she has appropriately dubbed herself The Typologist.)

"There are so many fascinating objects in the world, some things we see everyday and might not even notice," she says. "However, if you bring enough of them together, they start to tell a story and grab your attention."

Typology is, basically, the study of types. One of her more interesting typologies is of a box of Plagiola capsaeformis shells collected from a river in Tennessee and wrapped in 1889 shipping manifests from the now-defunct Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad.

She says each shell asks us to wonder about the scientist who first collected it, how he wrapped it and why, and how the whole box eventually made its way from Tennessee to Cambridge, Mass.

"Looking at collections makes you consider objects more carefully, and through that, the world around us," she says. "As a photographer I find myself compelled to use my art to portray the importance of collecting and living with objects in our lives."

Zlatanovski says she was first inspired by a collection of wrenches she discovered at an antique mall.

"There was something so compelling about this bin full of dozens of wrenches — the varied shapes and sizes, the different textures, the range of colors and patinas of the metal," she says.

Zlatanovski photographs on a white seamless backdrop with her camera connected directly to her laptop. She says she obsesses over the lighting, which differs greatly even between similar items.

"I have learned so much about all of the different objects I've photographed," she says. "For me, learning about and documenting what these objects are is equally as important as photographing them. We call the stories of a person's life a biography, and these life histories are these objects' biographies."

Diana Zlatanovski is a curatorial research associate at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. You can see more of her work on her website and blog.

Todd McLellan must have a lot of fun at his job.

How else to explain someone who meticulously dismantles, then painstakingly rearranges hundreds of tiny parts of machinery. And that's before he throws everything into the air.

The Toronto-based commercial photographer was the kind of kid who always took things apart, including an entire 1985 Hyundai Pony in secondary school. He said that if an object interested him, it would soon be in pieces.

"I've always had a technical grounding trying to figure out how things work," he said in a phone interview.

That fascination followed him into adulthood, when he decided to disassemble 50 design classics for his book Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living. The objects range from modern "smart" technology to older things that he collected on the street and at thrift shops. He looked for objects that were outdated but still functioned.

"I remember thinking, 'Wow, all this technology still works,' " he said.

To photograph the objects, he first tried conventional portraits but found the results "boring and stuffy." Eventually he decided to take the objects completely apart and lay out all of the pieces on a white backdrop.

He found the layout process interesting but tedious; then he thought it would be neat to just throw everything in the air. (He does most of the static layups himself but uses assistants to drop the items.)

"I think I've gained an appreciation for newer technology and for design overall," he said, speaking of the iPad and smart devices. "How they fit so much into such a small space is amazing."

McLellan's photographs seek to challenge our disposable culture by making transparent all the things that we regularly throw away. He said he wanted to get inside the older objects to show the quality, beauty and care that went into the original manufacturing process.

"I hope people think a little bit more about the things they use. Not that people should have feelings for objects, but instead think about 'reuse and recycle,' not just 'use and discard.' "

And, he said, he was able to preserve the parts of everything he dismantled, except the piano.

Photos from Things Come Apart are currently on display at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. View more of Todd McLellan's work on his website.

Before the age of computers and vinyl printers, sign painters worked by hand to illustrate storefronts, billboards and banners. Local craftsmen often developed a signature style that could distinguish a neighborhood, or even a city.

But technology made creating signs less expensive — and less expressive. Sign Painters, a new book and documentary written and directed by Faythe Levine and Sam Macon, focuses on dozens of artists who are keeping the art alive.

Before Macon began working on the film, he said never thought much about sign painting.

"I had never really given any thought to the fact that this is someone's job, and the fact that individuals across America were painting signs regionally that defined the way the United States looked," Macon told NPR's Neal Conan.

Once word got out about the project in the sign-painting community, they were flooded with personal stories. "We were totally inundated in the best way, and we ended up having more content than we could track down," Macon said.

One of the painters featured in the project is Norma Jeanne Maloney. She opened her business, Red Rider Paint and Sign Studios, in 1996 in San Francisco, then relocated to Nashville; she now lives in Austin.

She says she's been captivated by typography since she was a child.

"I wouldn't do anything else regardless of what the pay is," she says. "It's like having canvasses all over town of your art."

She remembers moving to Nashville and trying to make a name for herself. She offered to paint the sign of a Nashville bar for free and got six other job offers that day.

"I handed out my cards, and I basically painted lower Broadway," says Maloney.

Macon says he hopes the project will bring new life to the craft. "Whenever you set out on a project like this, you sort of have an idea that you're going to go out and define sign painters. And as we shot more and more, and met more interesting people, we realized that you can't define a sign painter any better than you can define a radio host."

Elie Gardner and Oscar Durand moved to Lima, Peru, in 2010, and every time they flew in or out, they noticed a large farmland by the airport. The husband and wife photojournalists began to wonder why there was so much land in the middle of an urban area, and who lived there and why.

One night they saw a story about it on the news. The government was taking back the neighborhood called "El Ayllu" and relocating hundreds of families in order to expand the airport.

(For a sense of scale, check out this satellite view of the airport and surrounding farmland, as well as this historical aerial image.)

In Incan times, ayllus were small, self-sufficient communities known for their collective labor and kinship. Gardner and Durand learned that this particular piece of land was once home to the grand Hacienda San Agustin that belonged to one of Lima's most powerful and rich families. Some of the buildings dated back to the 16th century.

The two decided to make portraits of the residents and their homes to document a small piece of the area's history before it was permanently destroyed.

"I love historic photos of cities, and I sometimes wish I could see for myself what those places used to be like," said Durand via email. "Doing this photographic series allowed me to do just that. Walking on [El Ayllu's] unpaved streets, I could see remnants of its past; it was a little bit like being able to travel back in time."

Durand and Gardner gained an introduction to El Ayllu through a filmmaker who was working on a documentary there and made 14 trips to the neighborhood over a few months.

The two photographers worked together, both making portraits in the field and collaborating later on the edit. They took prints back to the residents as a way of saying thank you and were overwhelmed by the positive response.

"The residents were going through a very emotional time," said Gardner. "Most had lived their entire lives in El Ayllu. In the beginning we were knocking on doors, but it wasn't long before people were coming to us to request a portrait and inviting us into their homes."

Durand said the warm welcome was especially poignant for him and Gardner.

"Lima can be an aggressive city to work as a photographer, and doing this project reminded us that there are good people everywhere," he said.

"Never in our photographic past have we felt so accepted by a community. They fed us (and fed us and fed us some more!), helped us deliver photos to families who had already moved, and treated us as part of their community," added Gardner.

The residents of El Ayllu were compensated by the government to buy new homes and land, but both Durand and Gardner doubt they'll be able to replicate the sense of community, or sense of history, of the neighborhood they left behind.

Elie Gardner and Oscar Durand are the owners of INTI Media, a multimedia storytelling collective in Peru.

Mark Hirsch is a 52-year-old photojournalist who happens to be friends with a tree — specifically, a towering bur oak on the edge of a cornfield in southwest Wisconsin. This unique relationship began on March 23, 2012, when Hirsch photographed the tree with his new iPhone, during a particularly impressive sunset. That test of new technology turned into a yearlong documentation, and a personal transformation.

"I shoot pictures for a living," says Hirsch over the phone, "and I had stopped taking pictures for me, so I decided I was going to start taking a picture a day." His subject was the tree he had driven past for 20 years but had never photographed. His project became That Tree, and Hirsch posted one photo a day on his Facebook page.

In the beginning, he says he was just taking a picture of a tree, but over time his relationship with the project changed. "The longer I spent down there, the greater my appreciation for what a unique force [this tree] was and what an impact it had on the quality of life around it. In that realm, in that microcosm of the world, it really is a tree of life."

Over time, the resident blackbird stopped squawking at his arrival and instead began to sing, but the challenge of photographing the tree in a new way became increasingly difficult.

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On the last day of the project, Mark Hirsch invited his Facebook followers to visit the tree and have their portrait taken. Close to 300 people showed up, along with 12 dogs.

Courtesy of Mark Hirsch

"I spent 25 years as a photojournalist constantly chasing the moment, and at times almost forcing visual opportunities. And photographing a tree? There was nothing to force! I couldn't impact anything."

Hirsch challenged himself to slow down and change his perspective, so he climbed the highest branches, laid down in the mud and in the snow, and learned to appreciate the grass beneath his cheeks.

"Call it the energy of place, call it the energy of the tree, call it the coincidence of patience, but it's been an incredible experience," says Hirsch.

In honor of Arbor Day, keep an eye out for the ordinary awesomeness that you pass by every day. Who knows, that tree on the corner could be your new best friend.

When Harry Gamboa Jr. saw Chicanos in the mainstream media, he didn't see himself, or the people he knew. And he wanted to change that.

Growing up during the 1960s Chicano movement, the Los Angeles-based artist resented how Chicanos were often portrayed, he says. His photo series Chicano Male Unbonded was his response.

"What was used in the media was this idea of creating inferiority or guiltiness," he says. "But these [Chicano] men had contributed to and saved my life."

He says his peers were shipped off to Vietnam to fight in the war, and many didn't think they would live past 21 years old. Those who stayed home were often stigmatized.

Since 1972, Gamboa has created art in various media and formats interpreting the contemporary urban Chicano experience. After years working with a group he co-founded called Asco (Spanish for nausea), he started his photography series in 1991.

He chose people who have "a stance of being affirmative in their own lives," he says. His subjects are professors, activists, fathers, war veterans and anyone who has contributed to his life.

Since starting his series, Gamboa has photographed over 100 different men. Some look Chicano, others don't — which is part of his point. They include his father, Harry Gamboa, fellow Asco member Humberto Sandoval and photographer Gregory Bojorquez.

Gamboa makes his images using available light — a lamppost or a storefront's illumination — and shoots with a 24 mm wide-angle lens from a low viewpoint. Subjects wear dark clothes; their eyes pierce the camera looking down from above. The composition and lighting are all part of his statement.

"They [the subjects] don't present a threat. They're assertive; they look like they won't back down," Gamboa explains. "They aren't physical fighters, but in a way they have stood up for themselves. It just shows their strength of character."

He says his somewhat unconventional portrait style has led some to question his portrayal of Chicano men. Others have reacted positively. And that, he says, is his ultimate motive — to call into question the viewer's preconceived notion of what a Chicano male should look like.

Next month, new photos from this series will be shown at the Artifex exhibit in Culver City, Calif. View more of Gamboa's work on his blog.

Brian De Los Santos is an intern with NPR's Digital News.

This project was born from an interest in documenting the transformation of Asia in recent decades.

The photographs in this series focus on Mongolia, where economic development is hitting the nomad populations living in the desert, changing millennia-old landscapes and traditions. It is an undefined border zone between centurylong traditions contaminated by a modernity that is still very far from progressive.

The purpose, through my experience, is to contribute to the preservation of this moment of cultural shift.

Michele Palazzi was born in Rome in 1984. Since 2011 he has been working on a multimedia project titled Migrant Workers Journey. He has exhibited his work at the New Mexico Museum of Art and at the Fotoleggendo festival in Rome. You can find more of his work on his website and on FotoVisura.

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

Curator's Note:
This young photographer brings all of our senses to Mongolia, portraying a country in economic and cultural flux. To view these images we cannot avoid the raw elements, the harsh sun, the endless permafrost. A closer look affords a glimpse into the tension between solitary days on this rugged, open land, and the lonely and muted atmosphere of modern entrapments. And yet the spirit of family, friendship and self-reliance are universally present throughout.