Odaka lies on the northeastern coast of Japan. It was once home to 13,000 people, but today it is almost a ghost town. When the earthquake and tsunami of March 11 triggered blasts at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, a 20 km radius exclusion zone was imposed by the Japanese Government. Within this zone, radiation emissions have been registered at four times the level considered safe for humans. Odaka is only 15 km north of the plant. A few days after the Exclusion Zone was created, I was one of the first photographers to document life inside the zone.

Simon Norfolk, United Kingdom, Professional Winner, People, Sony World Photography Awards 2012 Beskrivelse: The Irish photographer John Burke was a superb war photographer whose eloquent and beautiful photographs of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880) are a most extraordinary record - and yet he is virtually unknown. Using unwieldy wet-plate collodion negatives and huge wooden cameras he shot landscapes, battle scenes and ethnological group portraits of Afghans in what amounts to a record of an Imperial encounter which is both tremendously broad and yet suffused with a delicate humanism. These were the first ever photographs made in Afghanistan. In 2011 I went back to Afghanistan to follow in John Burke's footsteps. Loosely re-photographic, the new work is more of an Improvisation On A Theme By John Burke - looking at what you get when you dump half a trillion war-dollars on an impoverished and broken country like Afghanistan.Whereas Burke photographed anthropological groups of Afghan men, today's equivalents are women's basketball squads, foreign ambassadors and German Police mentors power in modern-day Kabul has been taken from Afghans and 'internationalised.' The big decisions in the country are now made in the Green-Zone embassies and the offices of the biggest NGOs. In Afghanistan today, the gossip is that Hamid Karzai is no more than 'The Mayor of Kabul.' My work is paired with Burke's and is presented as an artistic collaboration in the fullest sense (except that one of us is dead.)

A black belt only covers two inches of your ass. You have to cover the rest.” - Royce GraciePhotos of MMA fighters minutes after their fight.Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is a full contact combat sport,and one of the fastest growing sports today.Although its roots can be traced back to the ancient olympic combat sport of Pankration, today it is promoted as a competition with the intention of finding the most effective martial arts for real unarmed combat situations with minimal rules.

The southern Russian city of Sochi lies on the Black Sea. It attracts predominantly Russian holidaymakers who come for a mix of sun, sea, sand and nightlife. Restaurants are plentiful and competition is fierce. In the past decade, Soviet interiors have been mostly replaced by an eclectic mix of Roman, Greek and other unidentifiable cultural elements. Every restaurant employs a regular live musician. From behind a laptop, they blast Russian chansons and popsa into the restaurant through a wall of speakers. This renders any kind of conversation impossible. But that’s not the reason why Russians go to a restaurant.

Animals in the Wroclaw zoo