The eighth annual Nipponbashi Street Festa stamped Osaka March 20, 2012 (Nipponbashi is Osaka’s geek district – much like Akihabara is for Tokyo). Cosplayers turned up in colourful outfits, dressing as characters from their favourite manga, anime, and video games. The street was closed to cars, and otaku flooded the streets, snapping pics, cosplaying, and hanging out.

Vanessa, thirty-five, had three children with an abusive husband. She “lost her mind, started doing heroin”, after losing the children, who were taken away and given to her mother. The drugs led to homelessness and prostitution. She grew up on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, but now spends her time in Hunts Point, “trying to survive everyday. Just doing whatever it takes”.

“With the traditional tapping-ritual, the Oktoberfest has been opened on saturday, September 22, 2012. Despite the rather wet weather on saturday, the first weekend was te xpeted sucess: Approximately 850.000 guests from Munich, Bavaria, the rest of Germany and from all over the world came to visit the 179th Oktoberfest on the opening weekend. About one million liters of beer and about nine oxen have already been sold”. – Oktoberfest.de. (Photo by ◊CHЄЄKY◊MINX◊PHOTO◊DIARY◊)

Reuters photographer Siegfried Modola gained access to a circumcision ceremony in rural Kenya for young girls of the Pokot tribe, in Baringo County. Here: a Pokot girl, covered in animal skins, walks to a place where she will rest after being circumcised in a tribal ritual in a village about 80 kilometres from the town of Marigat in Baringo County, October 16, 2014. (Photo by Siegfried Modola/Reuters)

A Santa Claus puppet holding a Christmas tree is pictured against the sun in Berlin November 23, 2014. (Photo by Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters)

Nepali members of the LGBT community take part in a Gay Pride parade in Kathmandu on August 8, 2017. Scores of gays, lesbians, transvestites and transsexuals from across the country took part in the rally to spread their campaign for sexual rights in the country. In 2013 Nepal introduced citizenships with a third gender option and began issuing passports reflecting the same in 2015. (Photo by Prakash Mathema/AFP Photo)

A woman stumbes as people run down Oxford Street, London, Britain, November 24, 2017. Police are responding to reports of an incident at London's Oxford Circus Tube station and have urged the public to avoid the area. (Photo by Peter Nicholls/Reuters)

Bella Hadid attends the Los Angeles Lakers Vs New York Knicks game at Madison Square Garden on December 12, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by James Devaney/Getty Images)