Ornamental chicken breeding clubs have emerged in Indonesia, Thailand, North America and even European countries such as the UK and France. Malaysia is however the epicenter of this cultural phenomenon. These chickens are prized for their build, size, behavior and showmanship by their owners and competitions or beauty contests as they are often described are held almost every week in at least one village in Malaysia. Judges sit around a square table inspecting each chicken for a few minutes trying to determine a champion specimen in its own weight class based on its stance, temperament and physical assets like wings, tails and comb. The walk or strut by an ornamental chicken in a beauty contest, much like a runway model, constitutes a large part of the scoring system. (Photo by Ernest Goh/2013 Sony World Photography Awards)

A farmer harvests tobacco leaves at a plantation in the valley of Vinales, in the western Cuban province of Pinar del Rio, January 27, 2015. (Photo by Pilar Olivares/Reuters)

Ivan Shamyanok, 90, shaves in his house in the village of Tulgovichi, near the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, Belarus March 15, 2016. “My sister lived here with her husband. They decided to leave and soon enough they were in the ground ... They died from anxiety. I'm not anxious. I sing a little, take a turn in the yard, take things slowly like this and I live”, he said. (Photo by Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)

Los Angeles native Mike Stilkey has always been attracted to painting and drawing not only on vintage paper, record covers and book pages, but on the books themselves. Using a mix of ink, colored pencil, paint and lacquer, Stilkey depicts a melancholic and at times a whimsical cast of characters inhabiting ambiguous spaces and narratives of fantasy and fairy tales. A lingering sense of loss and longing hints at emotional depth and draws the viewer into their introspective thrall with a mixture of capricious poetry, wit, and mystery. (Photo by Mike Stilkey)

A little boy shouts “Earthquake!” during a shouting contest, part of the annual evacuation drill on the National Disaster Prevention Day on September 1, 1986. The contest was aimed at teaching youngsters the importance of telling neighbors quickly and loudly of a disaster when it hits. The drill is annually conducted through out the country on the day marking the anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake that hit the Japanese capital and its vicinity on September 1, 1923, killing more than 104,000 people. (Photo by Sadayuki Mikami/AP Photo)

A woman travels on a train stopping at a subway station visited by foreign reporters in central Pyongyang, North Korea on April 14, 2017. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

Typhoon Yolanda – also known as Haiyan – struck the central part of the country November 8, 2013, leaving at least 6,300 people dead and over four million displaced. A month after Typhoon Haiyan, the United Nations Population Fund estimates that 5,000 women were subjected to sеxual violence. A study by the Health and Human Rights online publication shows the majority of young girls and women in Manila’s sеx industry come from poverty-stricken areas – such as Leyte, Samar, Cebu and southern Mindanao – and enter trafficking through force, deception, economic desperation and psychological manipulation. (Photo by Hannah Reyes Morales/The Washington Post)

First place, The Beauty of Plants. “There are many stages of lotus growth on display at the Aquatic Gardens, but to come across twotwisted dancing stems of nelumbo nucifera was unexpected and quite magical”. (Photo by Kathleen Furey/The Guardian)