A Powerful Truth

Click here to watch Nicholas Kristoff's slide show on how educating girls and empowering women can help fight poverty and extremism.  Photos by Katy Grannan.

Difficult Decisions on End-of-Life Care

In the image below, Frank Foster, 60, sleeps under sedation to relieve pain and other effects of liver cancer, in the hospice unit at Franklin Hospital in Valley Stream on Long Island. Terminally ill patients, their families and their medical teams have the option of choosing palliative sedation to make dying less painful and to ease other effects of the transition, like shortness of breath, delirium or anxiety.  

Watch the rest of the slide show by Ozier Muhammed here.

Death And Destruction On The Cocaine Trail

In this audio slide show, Rory Carroll traces the bloody route of Latin America's most profitable drug, from being produced in the Andes to being fished out of the sea as "white lobster" by smugglers across the globe.

WSJ Best Photos Of 2009

Browse the 10 image categories here.  Photo below by Roger Lemoyne.

Wounded UK Soldier Rows English Channel

Major Phil Packer was told he would never walk again after being wounded in a rocket attack in Iraq in 2008. He rowed across the English Channel to raise money for the charity Help For Heroes.

Sierra Leone - Maternal Health

Sierra Leone has among the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. In 2009, it is estimated that one in eight women died during pregnancy. To get some perspective, one in 47,600 women die in pregnancy in Ireland. The reasons are complex but in part it is due to an insufficient health care system. In the capital of Freetown, one doctor has to serve more than 100,000 people. Getting drugs and equipment is expensive and the country is in desperate need of more trained doctors. Yet there may be hope since the government announced it will give free health care to pregnant women and children from April 27th, 2010 but they need help from the international community to make it sustainable.

View Amy Vitale's multimedia documentary here.

Called To High Holy Mountain

The ancient monastic community of Mount Athos in northern Greece still beckons men who seek to satisfy a spiritual hunger.  High on their holy cliffs, monks are defiant, zealous, prayerful. Meanwhile, the outside world creeps closer. See the series of images here.

Diamond Matters

From the mines to the jetset, follow the trail of the diamond. Photoseries by Kadir van Lohuizen in cooperation with Fatal Transactions campaign and NiZA.

Housing Is A Human Right

Homeless-led organization Picture the Homeless rally outside JP Morgan Chase headquarters in Manhattan.  Read more at Housing is a Human Right.

Music Festival In Mali

Photographer Peter DiCampo treks past Timbuktu to attend the Festival au Desert, an annual gathering of African musicians set in the dunes of the Sahara.  Watch the audio slide show here.

Child Soldiers

View the rest of the images this photo essay on child soldiers here.  Image below by Christophe Simon.

Cannabis Culture

Photographer David Walter Banks explores the legally hazy world of marijuana and its users in this photo essay.

Choosing A Road More Traveled

Clay, a gifted 18-year-old musician near the top of her class in her small town of Newark, Ohio, should be going to a top college on scholarship. But she won't be, because like many in her small town, she feels a need to make money more than music.  Read the rest of the story here.

Southern Sudan: LRA Violence Leaves People Terrified, Vulnerable

Photojournalist Brendan Bannon documented the deep wounds caused by attacks on civilians by the Lords Resistance Army rebel group in Southern Sudan.

Anchored In Faith

Ko Panyee is a true island village, built on stilts above the bay in southern Thailand. The humble community seems happy in its poor fishing heritage and Islamic faith but is also buoyed by a steady lunch crowd of tourists from nearby Phuket.

Living Fully

Staff and patient voices tell the story of the Hospice & Palliative Care Center of Alamance-Caswell in Burlington, NC.

Traveling With Ghana's Kayayo Girls

Photographer Peter DiCampo meets the young women who come to Ghana's big cities in search of work and a future. Watch the photo essay here.

Black Market

Every year, some 30,000 primates, two-to-five million birds, and ten million reptile skins enter the Asian wild animal market, the third-largest illegal smuggling operation in the world.

Photojournalist Patrick Brown goes deep inside this vast, dangerous world. He risks his own personal safety to take us on a fascinating journey through the lives of myth-bound Chinese villagers, the status-seeking nouveau riche, third-generation smugglers, and corrupt officials that make this market possible.

In cultures where tiger skins, rhino horns, and bear bile are imbued with mythical properties, these wild animal parts are bought and paid for at astonishingly high prices. In Black Market, we come to understand that the price for these rarities may be the very survival of endangered species world-wide, as well as the ecological stability of the planet.

One Face Among Millions

This video was created to support Mapendo International's campaign of text messaging to save the lives of forgotten refugees. Meet Grace.

The Big Picture 2009 Part 3

Click here to view the images.  Photo below by the Maldives Government.

The Big Picture 2009 Part 2

Click here to view the images.  Photo below by Daniel Ochoa de Olza.

The Big Picture 2009 Part 1

The year 2009 has come and gone gone months ago, but it's still worthwhile to take a look back over the 12 months of last year through photographs. Each image tells its own tale, weaving together into the larger story of a memorable year.  Photo below by Dylan Martinez.

Friends

Ever feel out of place like you don't belong?

The Ninth Floor

In the 1970s, New York artist Joe Smith rented an apartment overlooking Fifth Avenue. In the years that followed, the rooms became a black hole of drug addiction, hopelessness, and squandered dreams.  A chance meeting with one of the residents drew photojournalist Jessica Dimmock to the apartment, where she embarked on an almost three-year journey into the lives of those living there.

Love In The First Person

The College Photographer of the Year contest has launched many famous photojournalism careers. At 20 years old, Matt Eich is a hard-working college student enjoying life with his girlfriend, Melissa, when he learns he has won the contest but he is also going to be a father.  As these two young people navigate some very hard choices, they also stop to document this time in their lives, sharing their thoughts and fears for the road ahead. What results is Love in the First Person, a touching account of what it means to grow up.

A Global Search For Human Worth

A glance at Human Trafficking through the experience of PhotogenX.

Paula Bronstein, Photojournalist

Paula Bronstein recently won 2nd place in the Photojournalist of the Year competition.  In this 2008 interview, Getty co-founder and CEO, Johnathan Klein interviews Getty Paula while she was embedded in Afghanistan.

We Pray That They Do Not Come Back

Three segments from the forthcoming film "We pray that They do not come back"- a series of stories from a village in Swat that was the former Taliban operations centre.

Wreckless Willie

Willie Chapman has 10 children in 3 states and he’s 40 years old. Professional boxing matches are still his main source of income and also the only way he can pay child support to see his kids. Because of his age and losing record, Nevada may not license him to fight anymore. Willie also shows signs of dementia, most likely caused from continued brain trauma caused by boxing.

Down And Out In Portland

Dignity Village for the economically challenged in the Pacific Northwest.

The Girl In The Window

Three years ago a police officer found a girl lying in her roach-infested room, naked except for an overflowing diaper. The child, pale and skeletal, communicated only through grunts. She was almost 7 years old. This is her story by Lane DeGregory and Melissa Lyttle.