“What did I know about Chechnya before last week? For someone who grew up in the 1990s the very word Chechnya meant a string of grainy images on TV showing people in battered camouflage outfits, shooting at each other amid destruction and ruin. Fear, wahhabis, Shamil Basayev, terrorism, mountains: these were the words that used to spring to my mind when someone mentioned Chechnya”. – Maxim Shemetov. Photo: Special forces officers stand guard during a government-organised event marking Chechen language day in the centre of the Chechen capital Grozny April 25, 2013. (Photo by Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

Groundhog handler Ron Ploucha holds Punxsutawney Phil after he saw his shadow predicting 6 more weeks of winter during the 126th annual Groundhog Day festivities on February 2, 2012 in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

Photographer Loes Heerink spent hours waiting on bridges in Hanoi to capture the street vendors who walked underneath. She recently launched a Kickstarter project to publish a book of these images. Here: “In Hanoi there are a lot of street vendors who roam the city with their bicycles trying to sell goods, from vegetables to flowers”. (Photo by Loes Heerink/The Guardian)

China's Wang Yan performs on the balance beam during the artistic gymnastics women's individual all-around final at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, August 11, 2016. (Photo by Julio Cortez/AP Photo)

A man stands beside the Philippine flag as colorful umbrellas adorn a village hall in suburban San Juan, east of Manila, Philippines, on June 27, 2013. (Photo by Aaron Favila/Associated Press)

Children playing on Walled City rooftop in Hong Kong, 1989. The lack of formal governance in the Walled City led to challenges, but it also fostered a unique system of informal social order. (Photo by Greg Girard/The Guardian)

Youths pose for a photo, while doing their homework in an area once home to chop houses, where gangs dismembered enemies, but is now a “humanitarian space” in Buenaventura, Colombia, Wednesday, August 16, 2023. (Photo by Fernando Vergara/AP Photo)

Huang Mei-ya in a scene from Lunar Halo by Cloud Gate at Sadler's Wells in London in the last decade of November 2023. (Photo by Tristram Kenton/the Guardian)