The woman covered her face as she turned around, looking behind her as she waited to buy bread in a small shop in Raqqa, Syria. It was July 2013, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The Islamic State and the Free Syria Army both were present in the only major Syrian city captured, just a few weeks before, by the opposition.

And yet, said Alice Martins, a photographer and frequent contributor to The Washington Post, there was already a sense that extremists of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, were slowly solidifying their presence in Raqqa.

In the new exhibition at Catherine Edelman Gallery, three artists present a series of vivid colour portraits of black men and women from around the world. The show then asks: How do you see me?

Since the conflict began, photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind and I have been covering it as a team. This summer, we worked with eyeWitness to Atrocities, an app developed by the London-based International Bar Association that allows eyewitnesses to record evidence of alleged atrocities from anywhere in the world. Together, we documented the daily life of communities living along the frontline, often just a few kilometers away from the shelling, hoping to highlight the stories of pain and resilience.

Jared Ragland’s project GOOD BAD PEOPLE, a series that tells the story of Methamphetamine use on Sand Mountain, Marshall County, Alabama, received Third Place in the 2017 PhotoNOLA Review Prize (sign-ups open tomorrow!). Jared has a legacy with the PhotoNOLA festival. When I attended the event in 2015, Jared along with Eliot Dudik, created the book Bras-Coupe, in one weekend–it was shot, printed, bound, and sold over the 3 day festival–needless to say those who witnessed the effort were blown away.

In the beginning there is emptiness and darkness. The light seems to be hovering over the the surface of this formless void. Light is ordered to descend, for light is said to be good. It is a blow which separates the light from the darkness and, thus, the first day is born.

Ten years ago, John Moore returned to the United States after almost two decades covering conflict abroad. Having lived in Nicaragua, India, South Africa, Egypt and Pakistan, he had come home with “fresh eyes” that allowed him to encounter his own country anew. He was struck by the human drama in the struggle over immigration from Mexico and the people fleeing poverty and violence in their own country. When Arizona passed a restrictive immigration law in 2010, the “fear and xenophobia toward immigrants” that he began seeing inspired him to spend much of the next eight years traveling the length of the United States-Mexico border, working in immigrant communities and covering law enforcement and protests.

Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903-1993) was a singular figure in twentieth-century art, a woman whose independence defined the spirit of the era. “I had a strange need for something and I didn’t know what it was. I was in intense rebellion against certain things that they thought I should do because I was a ‘little woman’ and a ‘young lady,’” Álvarez Bravo told Olivier Debroise for Sin título [Biography of Lola Álvarez Bravo] in 1979.