San art adorns the new South African bank notes. Their smiling, wrinkled faces appear on adverts and postcards across the country everyone knows the stereotypical image of the slightly built hunter covered in an antelope skin loincloth and carrying ...

There are 420 helipads in Sao Paulo. That is 50% more than in the whole of the UK. Sao Paulo's chaotic traffic, with its six million cars, oppresses and complicates even more the ordinary citizen's frantic life in Latin America's busiest city. Those with...

From 12 June, 12 new or newly refurbished stadiums around Brazil will become the stages for one of the biggest sporting events in the world - the Football World Cup. And for the first time since 1950, the cup returns to Brazil, the nation which has ...

Towards the close of the 20th century, Witold Krassowski photographed the British at work and at play. Colin Jacobson, then picture editor at the Independent Magazine, describes how it all began: 'It was late and I should have been at home. The phone ...

Under an elevated toll road, beside railway tracks and a filthy river in north Jakarta, many of the city's poor live in makeshift dwellings. But two sisters from Jakarta's more comfortable suburbs are making a very real difference to people's lives. They...

At the end of October 2010, Mount Merapi (literally Mountain of Fire) in central Java menacingly rumbled into activity after a 4 year lull. Smoke can be seen rising from the top of the mountain at least 300 days a year and many locals are inured ...

Like those of other countries blessed with plentiful natural resources, Indonesia's mining industry is caught between the lure of huge profits driven by rising global demand and the cost to the environment and public health. Tin, gold and coal are ...

On 9 July 2014, almost 140 million Indonesians (or 75% of those eligible to vote) turned out to cast their ballots and decide their nation's future for the next five years. With the return to democracy still within very recent memory, Indonesians ...

Zack Canepari was commissioned by Habitat for Humanity, an international housing charity, to photograph one of their projects near Dallas, Texas in 2010. What he found was a small, largely poor, self-contained community that could be anywhere in the ...

'As you can imagine, regular practice of synchronized swimming is a great way to maintain health and strength - and a great way to meet active and fun women! We have many members who have had arthritis, joint replacements, and other health challenges - ...

He usually starts his day with a Pall Mall. Then he maneuvers his skinny, forty year-old frame through his cramped apartment and into his bathroom.A sign over the door reads "I Can Do Anything.".He brushes his teeth quickly and then starts on his ...

Donuts and Ghost-rides, Boxes and Buckets, Cools and Stangs. It all started in the Bay Area back in the 90s. Deep in East Oakland they'd meet in empty parking lots and spin circles until the police came. The Sideshow, they called it. Elaborate and ...

Tudo Bom?! All Good?!Throughout the four weeks in which the world's top footballing nations battle it out for the game's highest trophy - the World Cup - Zackary Canepari is going on a road trip across Brazil to capture a flavour of this vast, ...

'Violence, impunity, and horrific human rights abuses continue in the Democratic Republic of Congo.' That was how Human Rights Watch began their report on events in the country in 2008. Sadly, the description could have been copied and pasted from any ...

For the first time in human history, the majority of the world's population live in cities. At the same time, the number of people living in urban slums has passed the one billion mark; every third person living in a city is a slum dweller. The ...

What has become known as the "Jasmine Revolution" - the ousting of Tunisia's autocratic president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali who ruled the country for 23 years - is sending shockwaves through the Arab world. The coterie of despotic, kleptocratic rulers ...

The war between the Israeli army and Hamas militants in Gaza, dubbed "Operation Cast Lead", lasted for 22 unrelenting days from 27 December 2008 until 18 January 2009. In the wake of the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, shell-shocked Palestinians ...

The days of ultra-cheap labour and little regulation in China's manufacturing sector are gone. The Pearl River Delta, a former rice growing region, was remodelled into an industrial powerhouse for textiles, sporting goods and toys by the economic ...

China is in the midst of a love affair with coal - but it is not the healthiest of relationships. Year after year, China's production and consumption of coal increases. Worryingly, so do the fatalities. Shanxi Province is China's main coal-producing...

Like other photographers captivated by the events in North Africa and the Middle East, Christian Als was keen to get to Libya to document the uprising against the Gaddafi regime first hand. Though he couldn't be there in the first weeks of the ...

Families of victims of enforced disappearance in Algeria have been demanding for years that the authorities reveal the fate and whereabouts of their relatives, who vanished after being taken away by security forces during the violent civil war of the ...

One year on from the country's independence, South Sudan is facing a litany of challenges; none bigger than the health situation of those in the fledgling state's refugee camps. UNHCR has now placed the health crises afflicting camp residents as their ...

In June 2011, President Obama announced his intention to start the gradual withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan after a decade of bloody and often controversial engagement. But for many Afghanis, once again reeling from an increase in Taliban ...

'We aim to empower women, promote education with an emphasis on girls, and stop corruption and domestic violence. But since the administration is against the poor people of our country, we often end up taking matters into our own hands. We first speak to...

The gunmen, nearly a dozen of them, some in black commando fatigues and bandannas, others in ordinary clothes, came in the early hours of the morning. They opened fire while the villagers of Jorai were still sleeping. Pabitra Lankhasa, 50, remembers ...

As the wild broke loose in an untamed spread of ruin, people fled - some cried, others choked in horror; some scampered in hope, while others crawled for mercy; scavenging for the last scraps of memory, in little pieces of frayed curio; united in ...

India's farmers, mostly poor, malnourished and illiterate, have suddenly found themselves in possession of the country's scarcest resource: land. In Orissa, 14 different industrial projects, valued at well over $35 billion, have hiccupped and then ...

On 20 July 2011, the United Nations officially declared famine in parts of Southern Somalia and extended the geographical reach of the famine to much of Somalia over the coming weeks. The poor harvest and continuing instability in the country, which ...

Until the early 1970s, the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan existed in a state of total isolation, shunning television and tourism in an attempt to preserve its unique cultural identity. From 1974 onwards, King Jigme Singye Wangchuk decided to allow a ...

Every summer several hundred thousand devout Hindus from across India arrive in the mountainous and disputed territory of Kashmir, to take part in an arduous pilgrimage to a revered mountain shrine: the Amarnath Cave. 2011 saw a record number of ...

Paradise lost: Persia from above is a unique photographic record of a fascinating land. Georg Gerster, a pioneer of aerial photography, was granted unprecedented permission to record the landscapes and cities of Persia in the late 1970s. This is an ...

Five years after the Orange Revolution promised to transform Ukraine, excitement has given way to fatigue. The economy shrank by 15% in 2009, and the country lies 17th from bottom in the global index of economic freedom. The first round of the 2010 ...

50 years after Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev's now famous 'secret speech' denouncing the crimes of Josef Stalin, an official museum dedicated to the Soviet dictator opened its doors in Volgograd, formerly known as Stalingrad, in 2006. Initiated by...

Malaria takes its name from the Italian and means literally 'bad air'. For a long time the Romans believed that the fever was caused by the putrid air of marshlands, not knowing that the real cause is the Anopheles mosquito which thrives in such areas. ...

I arrived in Haiti ten days after the apocalyptic earthquake of January 12th. The world had been watching in disbelief horrific images of mountains of bodies burning in the streets or thrown in mass graves. When I arrived in the country there were ...

A bloody uprising in Kyrgyzstan in April 2010 saw the country's president flee the capital. Opposition leader Roza Otunbayeva claimed to have taken control, stating 'You can call this revolution. You can call this a people's revolt. Either way, it is our...