Born with a rare condition, the artist has chronicled her life in portraits – capturing everything from her tattooed prosthetics to the tentacled creature she stitched together on the shores of Naoshima. Here: Ophelia (2013). From a series of photos of imagined women exhibited at the 2013 Aichi Triennale. Here, Katayama invokes Hamlet’s tragic heroine, after the painting by British pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais. (Photo by Mari Katayama/The Guardian)

Runner-up. “The City of London, looking towards the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England. The ever-changing London skyline provides many excellent opportunities for cityscape photography, none more exciting than the ebb and flow of traffic at night”. (Photo by Mark Caldon/The Guardian)

REUTLINGEN, GERMANY - NOVEMBER 17: Students hang out finished parchment leather at the LGR (Lederinstitut Gerberschule Reutlingen) tannery school on November 17, 2010 in Reutlingen, Germany. Even in early antiquity and up their hair or dried goat and sheep skins were used as material for documents. In the small Asian city Pergamon these skins were processed in large quantities for this purpose, so they formed the main trading arm of the city, of which the name is parchment is derived. In medieval times, reached the parchment is of great importance, it was such as France's production under the supervision of the University of Paris. Even now, important documents, placed on their unlimited shelf life as possible large value (eg diplomas, addresses, memory, writings, documents for primary and keystones) written on parchment...

Wolfgang (L), member of World War One historical association “Darstellungsgruppe Suddeutsches Militar 1870-1918” (DSM 18), from Munich, Germany, and Florent, member of French association “Le Poilu de la Marne”, dressed in vintage army uniforms, visit the Bezonvaux bunker in the national forest of Verdun, eastern France, March 29, 2014. Members of French and German historical associations, who gather annually, together visited the battlefield of Verdun in France, the site of a bloody World War One battle that dragged on for around 10 months in 1916, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and destroying many villages. (Photo by Charles Platiau/Reuters)

Belgium. Rosalie, 9, goes to school in Brussels. “At my school we have separate toilets for girls and boys on every floor. My classroom is on the 3rd floor. We have 22 toilets, which are shared between 230 pupils and 20 adults. The teachers at school let us go to the toilet whenever we need to”. (Photo by Tim Dirven/WSUP/Panos)

Full-time feline photographer Andrew Marttila from Washington, D.C., captured blissful expressions of various cats on catnip, which he used to compile a book, “Cats on Catnip”. The photographer dedicated his time to capturing the euphoric expressions of kitties high on catnip – and the results are absolutely hilarious. (Photo by Andrew Marttila/Caters News Agency)

A woman cries while sitting on a road amid the destroyed city of Natori, Miyagi Prefecture in northern Japan March 13, 2011, after a massive earthquake and tsunami. Five years on from the tsunami that triggered meltdowns at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, the page is anything but turned. A magnitude 9 earthquake and towering tsunami on March 11, 2011 killed nearly 16,000 people along Japan's northeastern coast and left more than 2,500 missing. The 10-metre (33-foot) tsunami swept away everything in its path, including houses, ships, cars and farm buildings. (Photo by Asahi Shimbun/Reuters)