Dried and shrivelled corpses, some fully clothed and some in coffins, line the wall of a vault of the Pantheon Cemetery on the summit of Cerro del Trozado in Mexico. They were removed from the crypts because of non-payment of cemetery fees. The hot dry air stopped the bodies from rotting. Most of them were placed here between the turn of the century and WW I. (Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images). Circa 1955

With temperatures soaring and summer well underway, countless Americans will be spending their Independence Day weekend at the beach. Here we revisit some classic images from the turn-of-the-century to the 1930's of vacations by the sea, from Coney Island to Santa Monica.

“They’ve been obsessing me for years. I searched and found them in Benares, on the banks of the river Gange (India). They arrive here to get rid of everything and to wait for death. This existence can last for years, sometimes decades, almost a life. Opposite to mine, well organised and filled as a human life can be, to try in vain to push the limits of its end”. – Denis Rouvre. (Photo by Denis Rouvre)

Photographer Howard Schatz had an idea: place actors in a series of roles and dramatic situations to reveal the essence of their characters. Such was the premise behind his book, In Character: Actors Acting, which captures some of Hollywood’s most emotive stars in the act of, well, making faces. Luckily for us, he continued the tradition for Vanity Fair. Here are some of the best.

American artist Kurt Wenner creates unparalleled three-dimensional drawings on asphalt streets and of floor. Kurt – A former employee of NASA, which is the love of the art of the Renaissance left the space agency and left to raise the artistic skills in Rome. Has a variety of awards in the arts. Here is a selection of his works made in different cities around the world.

Frank Melech is a german artist that works with illustration and digital compositing. What we’re bringing you here today is a slice of such work that we thought, besides remarkably talended, highly creative, because Frank Melech starts with a light bulb, a universal symbol of Idea but also a metaphor for an enclosed but transparent world, and inserts in them precisely other worlds and ideas.