This picture taken on November 11, 2016 shows participants releasing a hot- air balloon during the Tazaungdaing Lighting Festival at Taunggyi in Myanmar' s northeastern Shan State. The skies of central Myanmar were set ablaze this week with the beginning of the Taunggyi fire balloon festival, one of the most beautiful and dangerous celebrations in Asia. Brightly coloured balloons with hundreds of homemade fireworks woven into their frames are sent soaring into the night sky, showering down cascades of sparks onto adoring crowds. (Photo by Ye Aung Thu/AFP Photo)

A man takes a shower on a street from water coming from a drainpipe as it rains in Havana, Cuba, Wednesday, July 27, 2016. During the last couple of weeks short but intense tropical downpours have been coming down of Havana every afternoon. (Photo by Desmond Boylan/AP Photo)

A ten-week-old North China leopard (Panthera pardus japonensis) is handled during a routine health check in the Zoo of Debrecen, northeastern Hungary, 30 January 2024. The female cub, which was born on 21 November 2023, belongs to a leopard subspecies that is endemic to the forest habitats of Northern China. (Photo by Zsolt Czegledi/EPA/EFE)

“The girl behind the camera and the girl in front of the camera”, May 2012. (Photo by: Mandy Rosen; Source: Flickr)

Sabine Pearlman‘s photographs find beauty in the destructive engineering of ammunition with this series of cross-sections of bullets cartridges from a Swiss bunker. They reveal the complexity inside each case. This series, which consists of 900 specimens, was photographed inside a WWII bunker in Switzerland. Pearlman says that she is intrigued by the beautiful complexity of the ammo set against its destructive purpose, at once showing off humanity’s ability to create and destroy.

Li Tingting, second from right, laughs as she is lifted off the ground by her wife Teresa Xu, right, outside of a beauty salon where the two were preparing for their wedding as clerks from an adjacent shop look on in Beijing, Thursday, July 2, 2015. Li, a 25-year-old prominent women's rights activist who was released from detention in April, held the wedding ceremony with her partner Teresa on Thursday and announced their marriage in an effort to push for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights in China. (Photo by Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo)

Joseph Szabo was a frustrated high-school teacher in need of inspiration – so he started photographing his students, and captured all the angst and excitement of being caught between childhood and adulthood. Here: “Priscilla”, 1969. (Photo by Joseph Szabo/Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery/The Guardian)

Rebelling against political propaganda, acclaimed photographer Antanas Sutkus embarked on a life-long journey to capture the everyday scenes around him. Antanas Sutkus, born in 1939, studied journalism at Vilnius University in the late 1950s before becoming disillusioned by the confines of the Soviet-controlled press. He began taking photographs instead, and soon co-founded the Lithuanian Association of Art Photographers. Here: The first Lithuanian bikers, 1974. (Photo by Antanas Sutkus)