It wasn't clear if they were lovers or just friends. I don't think they even knew. They had a chemistry that radiated from their intertwined bodies and spread over the crowd in tangible waves. Ceci and Meme were like yin and yang. Ceci was a ...


"It's not easy to catch a condor", Americo Waman said. He leaned in closer and his voice fell to a whisper. "You have to pay the Apus (Andean Gods) with incense, a coca seed, and a piece of llama heart. You must ask the mountains if you can borrow the ...


The southern tip of South America, made up of the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego and thousands of smaller islands, is separated from the continent by the Strait of Magellan, where the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans meet in tempestuous seas, and shared...


Legend has it that mountains used to walk and talk like humans. One of these mountains was Tunupa, a woman who lived with her husband and three children. One of the children died and the husband left, taking another child with him. In her grief, ...


It sounds like a contradiction in terms, and in many ways it is. But Bolivia - completely landlocked and at least 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean at its western-most point - is maintaining, and intensely proud of, its Fuerza Naval Boliviana, or ...


Bolivia is one of several countries in South America which is home to communities of Mennonites, a group of Christian Anabaptists who migrated to the Americas from Eastern Europe in a number of waves from the late 17th century until the 1950s. ...


On their epic 7 month journey from Quito in Ecuador down to Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of the South American subcontinent, Karla Gachet and Ivan Kashinsky encountered myriad different communities, landscapes and experiences. The last foray was to...


"Jallalla maestritos!" - "Jallalla," they all respond. In complete darkness, illuminated only with the lights on our helmets, I was chewing coca leaves with five miners and a devil made of clay, better known as Uncle Lucas. In front of him, coca ...


Richly adorned multi-storey mansions with elaborate turrets, balconies, pillars and adornments from across the history of architecture are not the first thing that springs to mind when one thinks of Roma, or Gypsies as they are disparagingly known ...


The Yasuni National Park in the east of Ecuador, home to the indigenous Waorani and Kichwa groups amongst others, is one of the most biologically diverse places on earth, boasting the world's highest density of amphibian, tree and bat species. The ...


Every May, the small mountain communities of Acatlan and Zitlala in the Mexican state of Guerrero erupt in raucous celebrations during the Catholic Holy week which coincides with the beginning of the spring planting season. The annual celebrations ...


The afternoon sun ignited the dust clouds as silhouettes danced along the mountain path between Salasaca and Pelileo. They passed like a pack of wolves closing in on its prey, with swords in the air and aguardiente (cane alcohol) on their breath, ...


Carmen Rosa works in a restaurant high in the Bolivian Andes. Like many Aymara women, she wears large colourful dresses, several petticoats and a bowler hat tipped slightly to one side. But unlike most Cholitas, Carmen spends her free time leaping from...


It's a painfully familiar story: a huge, ruthless oil company descends on a quiet, rural location, extracts vast quantities of crude oil with total disregard for the environmental pollution caused, then winds down its operation and leaves the ...


The Gringo The handsome Techno-Cumbia star took the Ñusta, an indigenous beauty queen, by the hand. "Are you single", he screamed into the microphone, holding her hand up in the air. "Yes, I'm single, and looking for a man", she yelled out ...


An industrial estate on the outskirts of the Colombian capital Bogota may not be the most romantic association most buyers of elaborate flower bouquets would want to make with their colourful and fragrant expressions of affection. Yet Colombia has ...


Once known as "Little San Francisco" and "The Jewel of the Pacific" for its vibrant atmosphere and hilly seaside setting, the Chilean port city of Valparaiso lost much of its status and trading traffic with the opening of the Panama Canal in the ...


It quickly became known as Camp Esperanza, meaning hope. At first, the makeshift tent city above the San Jose mine in Chile's Atacama desert was home to the relatives of the 33 men trapped 700 metres below. But as the weeks went by and the moment of ...


Edison Pea has been to hell and back and he has the photographs to prove it. Edison, an Elvis fan and fanatical runner, was one of 33 miners trapped 700 metres underground at the San Jose mine in Chile. He ran down pitch-black tunnels on every one ...


Tallaght village is a southern suburb of Dublin, lying on the western foothills of the Dublin Mountains. Once a small settlement, suburban development from the 1970s has pushed the population over the 100,000 mark. The area has suffered from high ...


The Ulster Defence Association (UDA) is the largest loyalist paramilitary organisation in Northern Ireland. For years it undertook a violent armed struggle against Republican movements and Catholic people. Since the Good Friday Agreement peace ...


Adam Patterson began this project in response to media reports on teenage gangs in London. 2008 was a particularly violent and bloody year in the British capital with 29 teenage fatalities as a result of gun and knife crime. In the wake of such ...


Las Vegas is an iconic international city, a glowing neon oasis sprouting from the Nevada desert. It symbolises the extreme end of western capitalism and libertarian values, an adult playground to cater for every vice. Roughly 150,000 people pass ...


Alice Seeley Harris, along with her husband John Harris, was responsible in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for what was probably the first orchestrated multimedia campaign against large scale human rights abuses. Alice Seeley Harris was a ...


Anti-Slavery International, founded in 1839, is the world's oldest international human rights organisation and the only charity in the United Kingdom to work exclusively against slavery and related abuses. These photographs and records are from their ...


Greenland, one of the world's most inaccessible destinations, is quickly becoming one of the last frontiers of the tourist industry, providing people with the chance to witness first-hand the melting polar ice caps. There's something inherently ...


To the modern day visitor, Crimea's seaside attractions look like any other holiday destination once enjoyed by the Soviet nomenklatura a brash mixture of fading glory and vibrant hedonism. But behind the beaches and hotels in this predominantly ...


Panos photographer Alban Kakulya was commissioned by ...


An exciting new project aims to give African journalists a voice in the global media in the build-up to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Twenty Ten is a multidisciplinary media project that focuses on strengthening African journalists from the ...


What does the World Cup mean to the people of South Africa? The photographers working on the Twenty Ten project found that there are many different answers to that question. The sex worker Natasha has been working the streets of Cape Town for four ...


An aging Nigerian man who has never left his home town recounts, in startling detail, his knowledge of the English football leagues. A blind man smiles as he holds a crackling transistor radio to his ear, the commentary of a live match blaring into the ...


On 25 January 2011, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in cities across Egypt to protest against the autocratic rule of Hosni Mubarak. It was a day that has been labeled Egypt's 'Day of Anger'. Finally, after 30 years of a leader's ...


The Libyan revolution started in mid February, at the peak of the 'Arab Spring'. Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak had fallen and the uprisings seemed to be gathering momentum, with mass protests calling for political reform...


The Gali district of Abkhazia lies in the South East of the territory, along the disputed border with Georgia, and is home to an estimated 40,000 Mingrelian Georgians who have managed to return since the end of civil war in the early 1990s. ...


With tactical advice and training from the US, the first of two massive country-wide military operations were launched in an attempt to rout the Serbian paramilitary units that controlled vast parts of Croatia. Operation Storm only lasted a few days ...


Kroo Bay, a slum housing some 6,500 people, many of whom came here to escape the violence and havoc wreaked by 11 years of civil war upcountry, is built onto the sandy shore on Freetown's eastern outskirts and has no sewage or electricity. Its boggy ...