In 1949, LIFE magazine sent famed photographer Nina Leen to document the daily life of a sassy troupe of young women who had run off and joined the famous Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota, Fla. What developed was a portrait of a sisterhood formed over acrobatics that mixed high-flying wire acts with fashionable high-waisted shorts. Sarasota was once considered “the home of the American circus”. Here: an aerialist smoking while rehearsing for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota, FL in 1949. (Photo By Nina Leen/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

A student falls asleep as she holds a book containing a portrait of China's late chairman Mao Zedong during a lesson at the Democracy Elementary and Middle School in Sitong town, Henan province December 3, 2013. In a remote part of central China, the day starts at the Democracy Elementary and Middle School with a pre-dawn jog, some revolutionary songs and then an activity long since forgotten at other schools: reciting quotations from Mao Zedong's famed “Little Red Book”. While the ruling Communist Party that Mao led continues to hold him in esteem as the leader of the Communist Revolution, his radical policies and teachings have been largely shelved since his death in 1976 in favour of a pro-market approach that has turned China from a backwater into the world's second biggest economy. The 120th anniversary of Mao's birth is on December 26, 2013. (Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters)

We’re showcasing photo-manipulation by Jan Oliehoek, a Dutch artist with a love for animals, photography and Photoshop. Oliehoek loves creating animal species that somehow never made it into our biology books, such as felines with rodent heads, lambs with the body of a squirrel, zebra rhinos and hippo-frogs! He’s currently having two of his pictures featured in Crazy Photography, an upcoming title from Vivays Publishing

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.

Dr. Adolfo Roitman presents a part of the Isaiah Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, inside the vault of the Shrine of the Book building at the Israel Museum on September, 26, 2011. in Jerusalem, Israel. For the first time some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are available online thanks to a partnership between Google and Israel's national museum. (Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

“Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (17 June [O.S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian-born, naturalized French, later naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor. He is widely acknowledged as one of the most important and influential composers of 20th century music. He was a quintessentially cosmopolitan Russian who was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the century. He became a naturalized French citizen in 1934 and a naturalized US citizen in 1945. In addition to the recognition he received for his compositions, he also achieved fame as a pianist and a conductor, often at the premieres of his works”. – Wikipedia

Photo: Composer Igor Stravinsky (right) and impresario Sergei Diaghilev in Seville during their Ballets Russes collaboration. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images). 1921

Nina Leen, one of the first female photographers to work for Life, took pictures for the magazine from 1940 to 1972. In the mid-1940s, her essay, “City Dogs”, featured actors and artists with their pets on the streets of New York City. In late-March, Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York City, is opening a solo exhibition of Leen’s work that features images from that essay and others. Here: author Fannie Hurst clad in mink coat, enjoying the jumping antics of her Yorkshire terrier Orphan Annie on the street. (Photo by Nina Leen/Pix Inc./The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

The competition, which is run by the Royal Observatory Greenwich in association with BBC Sky at Night Magazine, is now in its sixth year and has received over 2,500 entries. Photo: Centre of the Heart Nebula by Ivan Eder (Hungary). Situated 7500 light years away in the “W”-shaped constellation of Cassiopeia, the Heart Nebula is a vast region of glowing gas, energized by a cluster of young stars at its centre. The image depicts the central region, where dust clouds are being eroded and moulded into rugged shapes by the searing cosmic radiation. (Photo by Ivan Eder)