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)

The aurora borealis, or the northern lights occur over Derwentwater, near Keswick, England, Thursday October 8, 2015. The northern lights are the result of collisions between gaseous particles in the Earth's atmosphere with charged particles released from the sun. (Photo by Owen Humphreys/PA Wire via AP Photo)

"Steve McCurry: India", co-organized by the Rubin Museum and the International Center of Photography, brings together photographs of India-its people, monuments, landscapes, seasons, and cities. The exhibition at the Rubin Museum in New York runs from November 18, 2015 – April 4, 2016. Here: A boy in mid-flight in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India, in 2007. (Photo by Steve McCurry)

When Ed Templeton was a young skateboarder in California, he took Polaroids of his friends smoking at their local park. Those pictures in 1994 were the start of a lifelong habit – Templeton has been capturing youngsters all over the world experimenting with cigarettes ever since. Here: Santiago, Chile, 2002. (Photo by Ed Templeton/Robert & Tilton Gallery, Culver City)

This 2014 series Shanghai Tian Wa saw Chinese photographer Liu Tao train his lens on two distinct districts in Shanghai. Here: “Shanghai Tian Wai №26, 2014”. (Photo by Liu Tao/The Guardian)

5-year-old Rina Kumari rubs her eye while cracking stones on the banks of Mahananda river in Siliguri, northeast India, March 5, 2005. Over 400 million people in India live below the internationally agreed poverty line (living on less than US $1 per day). According to estimates, several hundred thousand children work as labourers and beg on the streets in India. (Photo by Desmond Boylan/Reuters)

India: A sweeper cleans the side of a road near a replica of the Eiffel Tower amid heavy fog in the early morning in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh January 18, 2010. (Photo by Ajay Verma/Reuters)

“Honorable Mention”. An Indian rhinoceros, far from home and stuck inside with late-winter blues at the Toronto zoo. Photo location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (Photo and caption by Stephen De Lisle/National Geographic Photo Contest)