Thorsten Mowes has a more intimate knowledge of the worlds most famous monuments than perhaps anyone else on the planet – because hes spent his entire career cleaning them. As a cultural cleaning expert with nearly 25 years experience, he has been commissioned to make wonders all over the world shine like new – from the London Eye to Christ the Redeemer. The places he has been to, stood on top of, or even hung halfway down include Mount Rushmore and the Space Needle in America, the London Eye, the Statue of Christ in Brazil and the Forbidden City in China. Here: A man cleans a part of Mount Rushmore. (Photo by Caters News Agency)

In this Wednesday, January 7, 2015 photo, a Sri Lankan Catholic devotee Rita Anthony kisses her rosary as she prays inside her house in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The Vatican has said that it hopes that Sri Lanka's Christians can play a role in helping heal the wounds of the island nation's bloody 25-year civil war, when the Tamil Tiger rebels fought to create a separate homeland in the north for the minority Tamils, who are mostly Hindu. The war came to a bloody end in 2009, but many Tamils say they feel forgotten by the central government, which is dominated by the country's ethnic Sinhala majority, which is overwhelmingly Buddhist. Sri Lanka's Christians come from both the Tamil and the Sinhala communities, making them a natural bridge between the two sides. (Photo by Eranga Jayawardena/AP Photo)

Nino, a ten-year-old toreador apprentice of the French Tauromachy Centre, nicknamed El Nino, touches a practice bull at the bullring of Garons, near Nimes, September 25, 2013. Since 1983, the French Tauromachy Centre in Nimes has trained some 1,000 youths in the art of bullfighting. Twenty of them have gone on to become professional matadors, facing fighting bulls in the arena. Twice a week, students take courses with a matador to learn the movements and gestures of the bullfighter in the ring, but without an animal present. Students train with calves in the surrounding fields during spring, and regularly participate in beginner's bullfights (becerradas) without killing calves. Solal has been taking courses for three years and Nino, for just a year now. Both are normally enrolled in French public schools, but have one thought in mind – bullfighting. They share a passion linked to the city of Nimes, famous for its ferias and bullring. (Photo by Jean-Paul Pelissier/Reuters)

“Joan Miro i Ferra (April 20, 1893 – December 25, 1983) was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miro expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and famously declared an “assassination of painting” in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting”. – Wikipedia

Photo: Joan Miro's, grandsons, Emilio Fernandez Miro and Joan Punyet Miro pose beside Personnage (1970) in the Yorkshire Sculpture park on March 14, 2012 in Wakefield, England. Yorkshire Sculpture Park stages the first major UK survey of sculpture by Spanish artist Joan Miro. (Photo by Bethany Clarke/Getty Images)

“Philippe Halsman (2 May 1906 Riga, Russian Empire – 25 June 1979 New York City) was a Latvian-born American portrait photographer. Many celebrities photographed by Halsman include Alfred Hitchcock, Judy Garland, Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe, Dorothy Dandridge, and Pablo Picasso. Many of those photographs appeared on the cover of Life. In such photos, he utilizes a variety of his rules of photography. For example, in one of his photos of Winston Churchill, the omission of his face makes Halsman's photo even more powerful at making Churchill more human”. – Wikipedia

Photo: Marilyn Monroe, “Jumpology”, 1959. Photo by Philippe Halsman

Back in 2010, French photographer Antoine Bruy began hitchhiking around Europe without any fixed route. Along his travels, he met people who had entirely abandoned city life in favour of an isolated country existence they found more fulfilling. Bruy began seeking out people who lived off-the-grid. After three years on the road, staying in makeshift houses and on community farms, he has released Scrublands, a documentation of the lifestyle. While each living situation is different, Bruy found that all the people he met shared a common desire to escape the rat race and achieve a quieter life in harmony with nature. (Photo by Antoine Bruy)

Alfred the frog looks almost as scary as the pumpkin he is perched on at London Zoo 26 October 2011. Keepers at the zoo have joined in the Halloween tradition by supplying pumpkin lunches to some of their animals, including the giant waxy monkey frog. However Alfred is not quite the giant figure his species name suggests – he actually measures up at around 4 inches (10 centimeters). (Photo by EPA/Zoological Society of London)

Cycling jerseys, part of a collection belonging to French cycling fan Gerald, hang from a line during the 4th stage of the Tour de France cycling race from Seraing in Belgium to Cambrai in France, July 7, 2015. Photographing the Tour de France cycling race comes with highs and lows: the buzz from capturing just the right image, the tedium of long journeys, the painstaking set-up of equipment, the breath-taking scenery. Reuters photographers have worked not only to capture the thrills and spills on the roads and mountain passes. They have also shot a set of pictures showing their own quirky view from behind the scenes as they travelled through the Netherlands, Belgium and France. (Photo by Eric Gaillard/Reuters)