Remembering is a tricky thing. It can release a river of volatile emotions that can drown you in sorrow or shame, and it can also unleash a torrent of vengeful anger. But forgetting is equally treacherous, lest those who were lost died in vain or the crucial lessons learned are not passed on to future generations. Rwandans of all walks of life navigate this complex riptide of emotion every day, each in his or her own way. It is far more art than science.
Photographer Thomas Peschak documented the remote atolls of Bassas da India and Europa, which are among the last vestiges of pristine seascape in the Indian Ocean. Interest in the rare ecosystem started at an early age for Peschak. “As a kid, I used to dream about the ocean. It was a wild place full of color and life. I pictured dense shivers of sharks ruling over the food chain and herds of turtles paddling through reefs and sea grass. As a marine biologist turned photographer, I have spent most of my career looking for the places I used to dream about when I was little.”
“If you want to suspend reality for a bit you can really feel like you’re on Mars. You look out onto this arid, red landscape and it really feels like you’ve traveled to a new world.” Photojournalist Jim Urquhart embedded with Crew 138 of the Mars Society’s Mars Desert Research Station for two weeks in March. The crew’s goal is to research and understand what it would be like to live on Mars.
Often the stories that physical anthropologist BrunoFrohlich uncovers during his fieldwork involve violence. In Mongolia, he’s pieced together murders that occurred as far back as the Bronze Age and as recently as the 1930s: children strangled, women with necks broken, people with their heads smashed, knife wounds, compound fractures—the details of each killing offering insights into the region’s culture then and now.Some of these investigations would qualify as the coldest of cold cases. But Frohlich’s work is not limited to the distant past. For nearly 30 years, he’s also worked with the FBI and provided specialized, archaeology-based forensic guidance and training to state police investigating homicide and missing-person cases. One such case even inspired the Oscar-winning movie Fargo.
Photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols has been photographing Jane Goodall since 1989. Nick on Jane: “[She] knew that chimps are a million times more complicated than gorillas. Chimps have been used as human surrogates in biomedical research along with their use in space programs. At the time I came along, there was a 1989 conference about chimpanzees. People were realizing that chimps were in trouble with habitat destruction, they didn’t have rights, and there were a lot of biomedical issues. Who better to be a flagship for chimp issues than Jane Goodall, with her work in Gombe? At that point she was not yet an advocate. It was her time to say: ‘I’m a serious scientist, and here’s the truth about chimps.’ She wanted to prove herself as a scientist.”
Be a Seed for Change 
You must be logged in to post a comment.