“Festive preparation”. Baghnapara, Bardhaman, West Bengal, India. Two girls prepare for the Gajan festival. They will perform a play based on Indian mythology. (Photo by Krishnasis Ghosh)

“The Nine Emperor Gods Festival is a nine-day Taoist celebration beginning on the eve of 9th lunar month of the Chinese calendar, which is observed primarily in Southeast Asian countries like Myanmar, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and also the Riau Islands. In Thailand, this festival is called Tesagan Gin Je, the Vegetarian Festival. It is celebrated throughout the entire country, but the festivities are at their height in Phuket, where about 35% of the population is Chinese. It attracts crowds of spectators because of many of the unusual religious rituals that are performed”. – Wikipedia. Photo: A devotee gest pierced at the Bang Neow shrine in Phuket. (Photo by Paula Bronstein)

A woman holds a skull during a “Dia de los natitas” (Day of the Skull) ceremony at the Cementerio General of La Paz. (Photo by David Mercado/Reuters)

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)

Sap runs out of a frankincense tree near Mader Moge, Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia on August 4, 2016In a tradition dating to Biblical times, men rise at dawn in the rugged Cal Madow mountains of Somaliland in the Horn of Africa to scale rocky outcrops in search of the prized sap of wild frankincense trees. (Photo by Jason Patinkin/AP Photo)

Thousands of species of amphibians are endangered and hundreds have already disappeared, but in recent years, a team of scientists and conservationists have re-discovered some of these “lost” species and uncovered previously unknown varieties. Here: Miniature glass frog. (Photo by Robin Moore)

Members of the Raskol gang “Dirty Dons 585”, 9 Mile Settlement, Port Moresby. All of these young men committed a set of rapes and armed robberies. The gang members admit that two thirds of their victims are women. (Photo by Vlad Sokhin)

Fisherwomen laying barrels with salt in preparation for herring curing, 1937. (Photo by Topical Press Agency)