Muslims offer prayers during Jumat-ul-Vida or the last Friday of the holy fasting month of Ramadan in Allahabad, India, July 1, 2016. Muslims throughout the world are marking the month of Ramadan, the holiest month on the Islamic calendar, by fasting from dawn till dusk. (Photo by Jitendra Prakash/Reuters)

Soma-Nomaoi is a festival that recreates a battle scene from more than 1,000 years ago. It is annually held for 4 days from July 22 to 25 in Haramachi City, Fukushima Prefecture, in the eastern part of Japan. In this historical event, 600 mounted samurai in traditional Japanese armor, with long swords at their side and ancestral flagstaffs streaming from their backs, ride across open fields. Soma-Nomaoi has been designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property.

Photo: A young woman (C) clad in samurai costume leads other local poeple as she rides her horse during a parade at the annual Soma Nomaoi festival in Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture, on July 28, 2012. The traditional full-scale festival kicked off for the first time after the accident of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant following the massive earthquake and the tsunami on March 11, 2011. (Photo by Toru Yamanaka/AFP Photo)

Western lowland gorilla Kijivu holds her newborn baby at the Prague Zoo in the Czech Republic. (Photo by Isifa/Getty Images)

Photographer Howard Schatz had an idea: place actors in a series of roles and dramatic situations to reveal the essence of their characters. Such was the premise behind his book, In Character: Actors Acting, which captures some of Hollywood’s most emotive stars in the act of, well, making faces. Luckily for us, he continued the tradition for Vanity Fair. Here are some of the best.

A mahout (elephant driver) walks a baby elephant across the city streets at night September 27, 2008 in Bangkok, Thailand. (Photo Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

A woman waters the plants outside her house in an alley at a slum in Mumbai October 28, 2014. (Photo by Danish Siddiqui/Reuters)

Bedouin breeders fix a robot jockey mounted on a camel before the 18th International Camel Racing festival at the Sarabium desert in Ismailia, Egypt, March 12, 2019. Several Gulf countries have banned child jockeys from the traditional Bedouin sport after rights groups said the youngsters were often injured and some had been abducted or sold by their families. (Photo by Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters)

In this July 29, 2016 photo, cowgirl Dariadna Corujo winds up to lasso a calf during an improvised rodeo event at a farm in Sancti Spiritus, central Cuba. At the tender age of 6, Dariadna is already an expert barrel racer and calf roper. In the flat grasslands of Sancti Spiritus, a group of neighboring cattle ranchers founded a non-governmental organization called Future Ranchers more than a decade ago to revive Cuba’s rodeo culture, which dates back centuries to Spanish colonial times. (Photo by Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo)