Vanessa, thirty-five, had three children with an abusive husband. She “lost her mind, started doing heroin”, after losing the children, who were taken away and given to her mother. The drugs led to homelessness and prostitution. She grew up on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, but now spends her time in Hunts Point, “trying to survive everyday. Just doing whatever it takes”.

Takeoka Chisaka, Hiroshima, Japan. “One morning in August 1945, I was walking home from the night shift at a factory in Hiroshima. As I reached my door, there was a huge explosion. When I came to, my head was bleeding and I had been blasted 30m away. The atomic bomb had detonated. When I found my mother, her eyes were badly burned. A doctor said they had to come out, but he didn’t have the proper tools so used a knife instead. It was hellish. I became a peace-worker after the war. In the 1960s, at a meeting at the UN, I met one of the people who created the atomic bomb. He apologised”. (Photo and caption by Sasha Maslov)

A storm whips through a tented area occupied by Nepalese earthquake survivors as a mother grabs her infant child and runs to find shelter in Kathmandu, Nepal 23 May 2015. Nepalese, who lost their homes in earthquake and fear aftershocks, have been living in temporary shelter in open ground which they had to flee because of the heavy rain and powerful wind. (Photo by Narendra Shrestha/EPA)

A woman rides a donkey during a donkey race in Roum village, Jizeen countryside, southern Lebanon, August 9, 2015. (Photo by Ali Hashisho/Reuters)

Visitors watch as Grigory Broverman, a member of the Cryophile winter swimmers club, pours a bucket of cold water over his 6-year-old daughter Liza during a flash mob, part of a celebration of Polar Bear Day at the Royev Ruchey Zoo in a suburb of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia, November 29, 2015. The air temperature was around minus 5 degrees Celsius. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

Carlos Cure holds packets of corn flour made in Colombia as he poses for a picture at a stall that sells food and staple items at a market in La Fria, Venezuela, June 2, 2016. (Photo by Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

Iraqi Kurdish female fighter Haseba Nauzad looks through a pair of binoculars during a deployment near the frontline of the fight against Islamic State militants in Nawaran near Mosul, Iraq, April 20, 2016. (Photo by Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters)

Lazar and his sister Andjelka sit by a candle in their home in the eastern Serbian town of Majdanpek, December 4, 2014. Electricity workers in Serbia struggled through snow, ice and treacherous terrain on Thursday to restore electricity to an eastern town left shivering without power, heating or running water for a fourth day. (Photo by Marko Djurica/Reuters)