Hugh Hefner spanks playboy models Izabella Kasprzyk and Bridget Marquardt during their birthday dinner party at Joya restaurant on September 25, 2002 in Beverly Hills, California. Playboy founder and sеxual revolution symbol Hugh Hefner has died at age 91. The magazine released a statement saying Hefner died at his home in Los Angeles of natural causes on Wednesday night, September 27, 2017, surrounded by family. (Photo by David Klein/Getty Images)

Alex Prager is an American art photographer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her photographs primarily use staged actors, models and extras to create “meticulously designed mise en scène”, often described as film-like and hyperreal. “Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive” is at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, 15 June – 14 October 2018. Here: The Big Valley, Susie and Friends, 2008. (Photo by Alex Prager Studio/Lehmann Maupin Gallery)

Do tears of joy look the same as ones of woe—or ones from chopping onions? In “The Topography of Tears,” the Los Angeles-based photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher explores the physical terrain of one hundred tears emitted during a range of emotional states and physical reactions. Using a Zeiss microscope with an attached digital camera, she captures the composition of tears enclosed in glass slides, magnified between 10x and 40x. “There are many factors that determine the look of each tear image, including the viscosity of the tear, the chemistry of the weeper, the settings of the microscope, and the way I process the images afterwards,” she says.

“Actor and director Mel Gibson has pleaded no contest to a “misdemeanour” battery charge after a fight with then-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva in 2010. Gibson, 55, was placed on probation for 36 months and ordered to attend a year of domestic violence counselling. The complaint accuses Gibson of “wilfully and unlawfully” using force and violence against Ms Grigorieva. A misdemeanour charge is generally considered a lesser criminal act than a felony charge in the US”. – BBC News

Photo: Oksana Grigorieva arrives at the premiere Of Warner Bros. “The Edge Of Darkness” held at Grauman's Chinese Theatre on January 26, 2010 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

A Santa Claus taking a selfie on a surfboard is seen in the yard of a home in the Sleepy Hollow area of Torrance, California, United States, December 15, 2015. In many neighborhoods of Los Angeles, homeowners compete for the most lavish and creative holiday light displays. Torrance's Sleepy Hollow is one such neighborhood where every home outdoes the next: surfing Santas, life-size nativity scenes, ferris wheels, and giant inflatable snowmen line the lawns on every street. (Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

Over the past three years, Los Angeles-based photographer Dotan Saguy has spent hundreds of hours documenting the diverse culture, people and pageantry of the iconic Venice Beach boardwalk. He was irresistibly drawn to the free-spirited, anti-materialistic and inclusive nature of the world-famous location, which he found to be a breath of fresh air in contrast to Los Angeles’s sometimes homogenized, celebrity-obsessed culture. (Photo by Dotan Saguy)

A woman wears roller skates with lights on the bottom at Rich City Skate in Richton Park, Illinois, January 12, 2015. A handful of decades-old skating venues put Chicago at the center of a vibrant African-American subculture of urban roller skate dancing that stretches from Atlanta to Detroit and from Los Angeles to New York. While mainstream roller skating has been on a long decline, a new generation of skaters travel a circuit of rinks around the country to compete and show off their moves. (Photo by Jim Young/Reuters)

“Potholes” is a series of photographs depicting the concave street cracks and holes as a collection of imaginative tableaux in the city. Captured within the backdrops of New York City, Los Angeles, Toronto and Montreal, the sets explore the urban flaws as a playground creating a multitude of uses out of the potholes. Directly engaging the street and the city, the highly imaginative series transforms the bad into good, creating a tongue-in-cheek collection that is at once contextual and surreal”. (Photo and caption by Davide Luciano)