“Early morning in Mandawa, rural Rajasthan: it was the morning of Diwali and the streets were swept by smiling women in brightly coloured sarees as I took an early morning cup of chai. Celebrations started later, when darkness fell”. (Photo by Hamish Scott-Brown/Guardian Witness)

A girl uses her mobile phone during the evening at the National Park in Khartoum, Sudan, April 24, 2015. (Photo by Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters)

Kieron Connolly’s new book of photographs of more than 100 once-busy and often elegant buildings gives an idea of how the world might look if humankind disappeared. Here: Bodie, Mono County, California. Gold was discovered at Bodie in 1859 (just after the initial California gold rush) and it went from mining camp to boomtown. Its decline began in 1880, when word spread of new boomtowns elsewhere. The Standard Consolidated Mine closed in 1913, and four years later the Bodie Railway was abandoned. By 1940 the population was down to 40. Today, Bodie is maintained in a state of arrested decay as a visitor attraction. (Photo by Alamy Stock Photo)

A demonstrator confronts riot police during a rally in defense of the nationalization of lithium reserves in the country, in Santiago, Chile on January 29, 2018. (Photo by Pablo Sanhueza/Reuters)

Japanese–British singer-songwriter and model Rina Sawayama, date unknown. (Photo by Press Handout for SFTW)

A worker covers mounds of rice with a giant hat-shaped bamboo cone in a field in Brahmanbaria, Bangladesh on September 21, 2023 after they have been dried in the scoring sun. (Photo by Joy Saha/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

Goats covered with cloth are tied next to a hut on a cold winter morning in New Delhi on December 26, 2023. (Photo by Arun Sankar/AFP Photo)

American television personality Dolores Catania in the first decade of February 2024 gets the “hot gossip” in a staged photo. (Photo by dolorescatania/Instagram)