Travel photographer Amos Chapple recently crossed into Turkmenistan on a three-day transit visa and was able to photograph many of the sights and monuments in Ashgabat, the capital and largest city. Turkmenistan is a single-party country, a former Soviet state, run by a president at the center of a cult of personality.

Photo: A young couple leave the Alem Entertainment Center in Ashgabat. The current president has a history of breaking obscure records. In 2012 the wheel atop this complex was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest enclosed Ferris wheel. The structure was built at a cost of $90m. (Photo by Amos Chapple via The Atlantic)

“San Diego Comic-Con International, also known as Comic-Con International: San Diego (as given on its website), and commonly known as Comic-Con or the San Diego Comic-Con, was founded as the Golden State Comic Book Convention and later the San Diego Comic Book Convention in 1970 by Shel Dorf and a group of San Diegans. It is traditionally a four-day event (Thursday through Sunday — though a three-hour preview night on Wednesday is open to professionals, exhibitors, and some guests pre-registered for all four days) held during the summer in San Diego, California, United States, at the San Diego Convention Center. Comic-Con is both the name of the annual event and the common name of the organization”. – Wikipedia

Photo: Rannie Rodil and Laya Bella attend Day 1 at Comic-Con 2011 on July 21, 2011 in San Diego, California. (Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images)

Invasion (laser girls) 2017. “I’m always thinking about my art practice, so any experience I have may spike a visual when I have an idea in mind. An example is that, when I was thinking about the Invasion series, I was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds (1963). I love Hitchcock’s other movies and have been contemplating a series based on Rear Window (1954). I also find inspiration outside the cinema in music clips and magazines”. (Photo by Michael Cook/Perimeter Books)

Shemika Charles limbos under her car at Niagara Falls State Park on May 28, 2015 in Buffalo, New York. A world record holding limbo queen thinks she has become the first person to shimmy under a car. Shemika Charles amazed herself and onlookers when she bent over backwards to get underneath the SUV earlier this week. The supple 22-year-old entered the record books in 2010 when she limboed down to an incredible eight and a half inches – the height of a beer bottle. She trains for up to four hours a day to keep her body in peak condition and now travels around America performing with her family. However, regular performances put an incredible strain on her body and she sees a chiropractor once a week to have her hips realigned. Her mother was also a successful limbo dancer in her home country of Trinidad and Tobago but had to give up due to injury. (Photo by Ruaridh Connellan/Barcroft USA)

A recent undated handout picture released by the Guinness World Records on September 9, 2014, shows 49-year-old trick golf artist Karsten Maas, from Denmark, who secured his place in the 2015 Guinness World Records book for creating the world’s longest usable golf club. It measures 4.37, (14ft 5in) in length and has been used to drive a ball a distance of 165.46m (542ft 10.16in). The 60th anniversary edition of the Guinness World Records book will reflect on six decades of record-breaking, whilst also featuring the latest additions to the oddball hall of fame. (Photo by Ranald Mackechnie/AFP Photo/Guinness World Records)

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.

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

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)