“A Hadaka Matsuri (“Naked Festival”) is a type of Japanese festival, or matsuri, in which participants wear a minimum amount of clothing; usually just a Japanese loincloth (called fundoshi), sometimes with a short happi coat, and rarely completely naked. Whatever the clothing, it is considered to be above vulgar, or everyday, undergarments, and on the level of holy Japanese shrine attire. Naked festivals are held in dozens of places throughout Japan every year, usually in the summer or winter. The most famous festival is held in Okayama, where the festival originated. Every year, over 9,000 men participate in this festival”. – Wikipedia

Photo: Japanese men wear loincloths as they splash about in freezing cold water during Saidaiji Naked Festival, at Saidaiji Temple on February 18, 2012 in Okayama, Japan. (Photo by Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images)

In this Monday, June 15, 2015 photo, Ahmad Abu Jereda, 16, carries Max, the male lion cub, as he passes by Palestinians at the main garden in Gaza City, in the northern Gaza Strip. A pair of lion cubs are stuck at a Gaza-Israel border crossing en route to a Jordan animal sanctuary, after being kept for a year by a family in crowded Gaza. Saduldin al-Jamal had bought the cubs from the Gaza zoo, hit during last summer's Israel-Hamas war. His family would take them to parks or the beach and children – those brave enough – would come up to pet them. (Photo by Adel Hana/AP Photo)

A Belgian shrimp fisherman rides a carthorse to haul a net out in the sea to catch shrimps during low tide at the coastal town of Oostduinkerke, Belgium July 3, 2015. At the end of each fishing session, the fishermen and their mounts leave the water to empty the net's contents into two wicker baskets fixed on each side of the horse. This traditional method of catching shrimps along the North Sea coast, which dates back to some 500 years, attracts tourists every summer. In 2013, Unesco recognized shrimp fishing on horseback as an intangible cultural heritage. (Photo by Yves Herman/Reuters)

In this photograph taken on May 20, 2014 nine year old Indian boy Lakhan Kale is tied with a cloth rope around his ankle, to a bus-stop pole in Mumbai. The nine-year-old boy dressed in blue lay listlessly on the pavement in the scorching Mumbai summer afternoon, his ankle tethered with rope to a bus stop, unheeded by pedestrians strolling past. Lakhan Kale cannot hear or speak and suffers from cerebral palsy and epilepsy, so his grandmother and carer tied him up to keep him safe while she went to work, selling toys and flower garlands on the city's roadsides. (Photo by Punit Paranjpe/AFP Photo)

Garbage pickers collect ride on donkey cart while looking for recyclable materials at a rubbish dump in the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq, August 23, 2016. Despite its huge untapped oil and gas reserves and steadily rising oil output and revenue, 23 percent of the population live below the poverty line, according to the Ministry of Planning. (Photo by Khalid al Mousily/Reuters)

When he's driving, New York-based painter Gregory Thielker takes in the views that change from moment to moment: the road, the sky, other cars. “Inside the car it's easy to forget the outside temperature, humidity, the noise of the road”, he says. “But something happens when rain interrupts the view: the lens through which we are seeing is revealed. Water both obscures and highlights the landscape”. Gregory Thielker's exhibition “Between here and now” will be at Castor Gallery in lower Manhattan from early March. Here: “Complete Stop”. (Painting by Gregory Thielker)

A tour group wanders through block 7 of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania April 30, 2014. Opened in 1829, with the original corrective system of “confinement in solitude with labor”, the penitentiary housed about 75,000 inmates in its 142 years of operation. At Eastern State reunions, former inmates, staff and guard gather to share memories and trade stories and get a chance to describe their experiences in question-and-answer sessions with the public. (Photo by Mark Makela/Reuters)

Ethiopian pilgrims pray during a Mass service for Ethiopian Christmas at the Bole Medhane Alem cathedral in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Monday, January 6, 2025. (Photo by AP Photo/Stringer)