Many of Adam Nadel’s photographs are, at first glance, quiet landscapes devoid of human presence.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Today, the fight over access in South Texas continues, with the effects of H.B. 2 not just visible in closed clinics. They are also seen in the lives of women fighting for what they feel is right. I photographed these women as part of a long-term project for the San Antonio Express-News. In early 2016, my editor, Luis Rios, and I began thinking about how we could cover abortion in South Texas in a deeper way. We knew that regardless of the outcome of the Supreme Court case, which was still pending at the time, the landscape of abortion access had changed dramatically.

For the past 12 years I’ve been compelled to photograph schooling fish, focusing on Akule (Big Eyed Scad–Selar crumenophthalmus). These images were taken at Kealakekua Bay and Keauhou Bay on the Kona Coast of the Island of Hawaii, and Waimea Bay on Oahu’s North Shore.

Fault Line is a project I am doing in the small coastal town of Brooklin, Maine. The protagonist is my younger cousin Adam, who lives there. I also photograph my brother, father, and other cousins. I chose the title because a fault line alludes to where the earth splits in an earthquake (a metaphor for a divided family with a complicated history) and also alludes to fault, or blame (I wonder, how does a family support each other, even when things aren’t perfect?). My goal is to show the weight we all carry and how we are both connected and isolated from each other.

Instagram and iPhones didn’t exist when Beth Dubber began taking street photographs in Los Angeles in 2006. She had moved there in 2003, hoping for a career as a set photographer for film and television. While waiting for her big break, she joined a local networking group where she got the idea to photograph Los Angeles one day a week, and share one picture with a weekly email list. Remember, this was 2006: Social media hadn’t taken off, and the list forced her into a habit of shooting weekly, no matter what.

Formerly homeless photographer Robert Shults recently explained in a Q&A with PDN the ethical and esthetic challenges of photographing homeless people, and how photographers can approach the topic in ways that dignify the subjects and elicit empathy and deeper understanding on the part of viewers.

This post is part of the In Sight series, “PHOTOGRAPHERS edit PHOTOGRAPHERS.” In this installment, NOOR photographer Nina Berman edits the work of her colleague, Jordanian photographer Tanya Habjouqa. Habjouqa is a founding member of Rawiya, the first all-female photo collective of the Middle East, and she is currently based in East Jerusalem. Habjouqa’s project, Occupied Pleasures, received support from the Magnum Foundation and achieved a World Press Photo award in 2014. Culminating in a namesake book by FotoEvidence, it was heralded by Time magazine and the Smithsonian Institution as one of the best photo books of 2015.

When the Istanbul-based photojournalist Monique Jacques traveled to Gaza in 2012, she expected to see evidence of violence and war, and she did. But she also saw something else: pieces of herself as a preteen, teenager, and young woman, mirrored in the many girls who called this place their home. Over the course of five years, she came back to tell their stories, compiled in the upcoming book Gaza Girls: Growing Up in the Gaza Strip.

I have admired Adrienne Defendi’s work for a number of years and was very happy to meet her and see her work in person at Photolucida. Having a background in the toy camera world, I know the artistry it takes to transcend a plastic lens and limited range of options.  But Adrienne’s work follows in the footsteps of the ground breaking work by Nancy Rexroth, where the tool to create the work is secondary to the imagery. These beautifully seen and captured photographs, rich in metaphor and story telling, take us through the final chapter of her parent’s lives. Her project, Relinquish, is a quiet and poetic documentation of love, loss, memory, and last days.

The public pool is a lot of things: It’s a vital sanctuary for those who don’t live in gated communities or belong to private swim clubs. It’s a destination that, for kids, sets the rhythm of summer days until school starts again. And — as I’ve found in visiting pools from Washington, D.C., to Chippewa Falls, Wis., from Villisca, Iowa, to Los Angeles — it’s a great place to get a feel for the character and culture of a community.

The photographer is Santu Mofokeng, and the caption of the image opens up a world: ‘‘The Drumming, Johannesburg- Soweto Line, from Train Church, 1986.’’ We now know that we are in South Africa, that the hand is not at rest as we might have first guessed but drumming on the wall of a train carriage and that the train carriage is doing double duty as a church.

Last 14 June, a huge fire broke out at Grenfell Tower, a public housing building in West London, killing at least 80 people; since then, new questions have been made about London‘s social housing and whether council tenants live in safe conditions. With her long-term series In Brutal Presence, 31 year-old Bermudian photographer Nicola Muirhead brings us inside the flats of Trellick Tower—a social housing estate rising about one mile away from Grenfell Tower

Off Colombia’s Caribbean coast, two hours from Cartagena, sits a dot of an island, just over two acres big and barely noted on maps. Until a few generations ago, it was uninhabited, a rest stop for fishermen lured to its shores by the simple promise of solid ground.

Then some decided to stay. A few more joined them. And so on until Santa Cruz del Islote became what it is today: the most densely-populated island on earth. That’s what attracted Charlie Cordero, a documentary photographer from Barranquilla, just as it draws tourists from all over the world. Everyone wants to see what it’s like for 1,200 people to live on a patch of land four times as dense as Manhattan, with no services – no running water, sewer system, police, hospital, trash pickup.

Earlier this year, AFP photographer Dominick Reuter and Getty photographer Spencer Platt both visited the Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to photograph “El Campamento,” one of the largest open-air drug markets and shooting galleries on the East Coast, before it was shut down. According to Getty: “People come from throughout the city, and some as far away as the Midwest, for heroin that is remarkably cheap and pure.” At the end of July, the encampment, littered with mattresses, used needles and other refuse, started to be cleaned up and closed down by city workers and Consolidated Rail employees, while outreach workers try to help place homeless residents of the camp. Getty further reported that “over 900 people died last year in Philadelphia from opioid overdoses, a 30 percent increase from 2015.”

Haley Jane Samuelson’s Year of the Beast is quite the coming of age story, though not so much in the traditional sense.  Here is a body of work not revolving around becoming an adult or the process of finding the one and only, but establishes itself later in life in a place that is reserved for the achieved, the settled, the people that have “figured it all out.” After living in New York for ten years, Samuelson and her husband relocate westward to Colorado to live with family. What follows are the stories and depictions of two newlyweds having to make unexpected changes in a time they are meant to be settling down. These photographs are their daily intimate lives, caught in ever-shifting light and liminal space, and paired with narratives that provide a little more insight into their transition.

Photographers Nishant Shukla and Jim Goldberg share their work in our annual photo issue.

Photographers Maria Gruzdeva and Mark Power share their work in our annual photo issue.

Photographers Tommy Kha and William Eggleston share their work in our annual photo issue.

Photographers Isabella Lanave and Alessandra Sanguinetti share their work in our annual photo issue.

Photographers Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. and Carrie Mae Weems share their work in our annual photo issue.