Photographer Alice Smeets was born in the German speaking part of Belgium in 1987 and currently divides her time between Belgium and Haiti

Inside the family hut, only women and close male relatives were allowed to mourn over the body of the baby boy, Khan Mohammad, who had died earlier that morning. After Andrea Bruce, on assignment for The New York Times, bent over double and eased her way through the low door of the hut, she counted 17 women, including the mother, plus the boy’s 10-year-old sister Feroza, and the father, in a one-room house no larger than a normal-size bedroom. It was, she said, even colder inside than outside, where at least there was the weak morning sun.

Link: LightBox

That visit spurred a four-year journey for photographer Anoek Steketee, documented in their series Dream City, through the world of carnies and Ferris wheels from Rwanda to Turkmenistan. The parks’ surreal fairy-tale settings, with perfectly manicured gardens in areas torn by genocide and ethnic clashes, showed the duo that the desire to escape from reality is a universal human need

Link: Photo Booth:

The genesis for Jason Andrew’s current project, “Under the Banners of American Flags,” came in April, 2010, as he witnessed the growing momentum across America of what would become the Tea Party movement. Last summer, as Republicans geared up for the Presidential electoral spectacle, Andrew hopped on board the Tea Party Express for its fifth tour across the land of the free

Link: Lens

Misha Friedman’s photographs of tuberculosis are dark, black-and-white glimpses of passing lives. In many of the frames — shot in Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Russia — there is a wandering, ghostly presence.

Link: LightBox

Photographer Alessio Romenzi has been among just such enemies of the Assad government: with fighters of the Free Syrian Army and with the people of Bab Amr, a rebellious district in the besieged city of Homs. On assignment for TIME, he took shelter with local families in a basement of Bab Amr. No one dared to step outside or even venture upstairs for fear of government shells crashing onto them. Bodies were dragged into homes from the street so they would not rot in the open. The dead littered the corridors. It was too dangerous to hold funerals. Romenzi counted 25 civilian fatalities in just two hours of bombardment in his immediate area. As he wrote in an email, “The word ‘safe’ is not in our dictionary these days.”

Link: PDN

Olga Kravets, Maria Morina and Oksana Yushko have been working on “Grozny: Nine Cities” for more than two years

Link: Lens

Evgenia Arbugaeva has warm memories of a very cold place.

She grew up in Tiksi, a port town on Siberia’s Arctic coast — to her, a magical realm of wonder and discovery where she reveled in the “little miracles” of her endless natural playground

Link: LPV Magazine

Christophe Negrel

Link: L E N S C R A T C H

Over the past year I have been working on this project of the closed auto dealerships in Los Angeles. Well over 3500 dealerships have closed nationwide, laying off an estimated 200,000 people. This presence is felt in these acres of empty asphalt and boarded up buildings

Link: Photo Booth:

New York City is long and tall, and there are a million ways to slice it. In a show called “Widely Different,” part of the inaugural exhibition of the recently re-opened South Street Seaport Museum

Link: Lens

There are all sorts of reasons why people become New York City police officers. Tradition. Family ties. The pension. Antonio Bolfo’s reasoning was simple.

“I was bored,” he said.

Link: LightBox

“One Shot” Harris freelanced for the Pittsburgh Courier, chronicling the life of black neighborhoods throughout the city.

Link: Redlights and Redeyes

I-4 is an interesting road.  Connecting Daytona, Orlando and Tampa, it slices the nub of South Florida right off the map, it provides a vast array of landmarks – strange kitschy theme parks, vasectomy billboards, and rest stop oasis after oasis.  It is also fertile ground for voters and an area candidates target every election cycle.

Link: Redlights and Redeyes

here are some random rectangles from the week of covering Mitt Romney’s win in the Florida Primary with some scraps from the cutting room floor as a bonus.

Link: Lens

This week, while Mr. Ríos Montt is under house arrest, Ms. Simon is reprinting her book “Guatemala: Eterna Primavera, Eterna Tirania,” a chronicle of the worst of the war years that builds upon her 1988 volume “Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny.” This time, she has raised $20,000 through Kickstarter to help produce 4,000 copies on glossy stock and with sewn bindings that will be sold for about $10 each. More important, she has set aside some 1,000 copies to be given away to schools and teachers in Guatemala.

Link: LightBox

A youth wasted on video games unexpectedly paid off for me in an assignment to profile the old dogs behind the newest gaming company: Innovative Leisure

Link: Lens

Before he became one of Latin America’s most prolific filmmakers — with more than 80 movies credited to his production company — Luiz Carlos Barreto was a photographer. For 15 years beginning in the late 1940s, he worked for O Cruzeiro, a Brazilian weekly magazine similar to Life or Look traveling all over Latin America and also working as a correspondent in Europe.

Link: LightBox

The Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund has made an exclusive announcement to LightBox disclosing the winners of its 2012 grants. The fund, which began in 2009, awards the annual prize to photographers from around the world who use their cameras to shed light on underserved issues and communities.