Returning to venues where he attended metal shows years ago, Matthew DeFeo captures the vulnerability behind these artists’ angsty facades.

Liu Heung Shing looked outside the car window: an imposing portrait of Mao Zedong had disappeared from the east side of Tiananmen Square. It was 1981.

The New York Times photographer Josh Haner has spent the past four years capturing the effects of climate change around the world and under water.

Pieter Hugo is probably best known for his brutally frank portraits of his “kin,” mainly the Afrikaners of South Africas post-apartheid era. Later on, his portraits of Nigerian gangs wielding chained hyenas in intimidating poses brought international recognition. Traversing Africa, clearly unafraid to venture out to areas earlier closed to South African passport holders, Pieter has shot starkly direct portraits of young and old, often against a backdrop of ravaged landscapes and still life images. His photo work includes Rwandan children a decade after the genocide; Ghanaian city workers at toxic recycling dumps; Ghanas rural wild honey collectors, donning make-shift tree leaves against dangerous bee stings; South Africans with albinism; and, intimate looks at family and friends, as well as self-portraits.

The photographer Cheryle St. Onge is an only child. Her father was a physics professor and researcher; her mother, Carole, was a painter. “I had a truly magical childhood,” St. Onge told me recently. She grew up on university campuses, in Michigan, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, going on sailing trips and nature walks with her parents. St. Onge’s photos, which often celebrate the natural world, pay tribute to that inheritance. “It was a mix of science, authenticity, and curiosity,” she said. “I think that’s the nature of life for me.”

Before her career as a distinguished fiction writer, Eudora Welty applied her short-form prowess to photographing life in Depression-era Mississippi.

The subjects of Sheron Rupp’s photographs can often be found in their yards, where garden hoses twist in loops near their bare ankles and kids take up broken branches as props. People young and old move through gardens, sit back on porches, and stand amid drying laundry. Grass has been worn to dirt in patches between driveways and front steps. For two and a half decades, from the eighties into the two-thousands, Rupp traversed the United States, with her camera, lingering in rural towns. She would spot something that interested her—kiddie pools, bird houses, bicycles—pull over to the side of the road, and spark conversations with whoever she encountered. Only after getting to know them would she explain that she was a photographer. In her new book, “Taken From Memory,” we see the results of those acquaintanceships and the many ways that private life can spill out into public view.