Sixteen hours into a transplant operation at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, surgeons finish the intricate task of removing the face from an organ donor. Awed by the sight and by the gravity of their work, the team falls suddenly silent as staff members document the face in between its two lives. The surgeons would spend 15 more hours attaching the face to Katie Stubblefield.
Before Katie Stubblefield had a face transplant, she posed for this portrait. It shows her severely injured face—but photographer Maggie Steber also wanted to capture “her inner beauty and her pride and determination.”
Laura Sermeño and her baby boy celebrate the end of her 'cuarentena' or quarantine. The tradition, common throughout Latin America, requires new mothers to rest under the care of their relatives for some 40 days after childbirth. The period ends with a mother-child herbal bath and a massage.
Chaelcie Mosley (left) stands with her son and a portrait of his father, killed in a drive-by shooting.
The Prom Queen, Cha'Leyah Fleming, a senior at Northwestern High School in Flint, Michigan, poses for a portrait at her 2018 Senior Prom Dance. 2018 is the last year Northwestern will hold prom. Next year the school will close and all the students in Flint will be consolidated into one high school. The decision to close the school was made because of decreased enrollment and an aging building.
Pageantry and performance are an important part of life at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Here, last year's winner of Clark Atlanta University's Miss Collegiate 100, says a prayer with this year's contestants backstage before the curtains go up.
Woodrow Vereen, Jr.'s two young sons were riding with him when he was stopped and searched by police for running a yellow light in Connecticut. He won a cash settlement after suing police over the illegal search and now struggles with what to tell his children about how to regard the police.
Morehouse College student government leaders John Cooper and Kamren Rollins paint a sign on campus to stimulate discussion about the N-word. Another student passes by wearing a T-shirt with an image of the late rap artist Tupac Shakur, who used the term liberally in his lyrics.
The four letters of the genetic code —A, C, G, and T—are projected onto Ryan Lingarmillar, a Ugandan. DNA reveals what skin colour obscures: We all have African ancestors.
Children in South Los Angeles celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, at a picnic co-sponsored by Islah LA, a Black Muslim community centre. Led by Imam Jihad Saafir, the centre works to promote community, education, and social and economic empowerment.
At Checkpoint 300 near Bethlehem, Palestinians from the West Bank, some climbing the walls to jump the queue, wait to be cleared for entry into Israel. Thousands of workers endure the daily ordeal in exchange for better paying work in Israel. Disparities in economic opportunity often reinforce divisions based on religion, ethnicity, or rival territorial claims.
Conflict between groups inflicts pain on people who have no say in the fight. After fleeing Myanmar army troops, hundreds of Rohingya children struggle for food at Balukhali refugee camp in southern Bangladesh. In 2017 at least 700,000 Rohingya were forced to flee a campaign of murder, rape, and devastation by Myanmar's army.
Two children sleep on the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge, waiting to be heard on their asylum requests. Migrants often wait days on the bridge to speak with a U.S. officer about their case.
After sheets of clear plastic trash have been washed in the Buriganga River, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Noorjahan spreads them out to dry, turning them regularly— while also tending to her son, Momo. The plastic will eventually be sold to a recycler. Less than a fifth of all plastic gets recycled globally. In the U.S. it’s less than 10 percent.
A catcher on Bacan island, Indonesia, sorts his specimens, which he’ll sell in Bali. From there the butterflies are exported throughout Asia and on to collectors worldwide.
In Sweden hundreds of immigrant children whose families face deportation have contracted resignation syndrome, a baffling disorder in which the child withdraws from the world, won’t react even to painful stimuli, and must be nourished with a feeding tube— sometimes for years. “She is not suffering now,” physician Elisabeth Hultcrantz says of Leyla Ahmed, 10, a Syrian refugee.
Kamilah Munirah Bolling and Adil Justin Cole stand outside their home in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
In the Wakhan corridor, Sidol (left), Jumagul (centre), and Assan Khan (right) return on their yaks after monitoring the growth of grasses at lower elevations. Herds will be kept off that pasture so the grasses can be harvested, dried, and used by the Wakhi people for animal fodder in the winter months.
Farzan Sheikh, then 16, was shot in the left eye by an Indian policeman with a pellet gun on March 28, 2017. It happened in his neighbourhood in Srinagar, in Indian-administered Kashmir. Sheikh was an unwitting victim again last August, when pellets blinded his right eye. “He moves with the memory of the house,” says his mother, Muzamil.
June 7, 1998, Huff Creek Road, Jasper, Texas | 1 killed
White supremacists murdered James Byrd, Jr., an African American, by chaining him to a pickup truck and dragging him along this road. Evidence circles mark where pieces of Byrd’s body were found.
On a Portland commuter train Micah Fletcher and two other men defended two women—one wearing a hijab—from a man spewing anti-Muslim abuse. The assailant stabbed all three men. Two died, and Fletcher suffered a deep neck wound. He said he instinctively stepped in to help the women. Diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum as a child, he was bullied and beaten. “If you are truly a community, then everybody should be expected to stand up for one another,” he says.
Rasheed al Suwaidy shows a urologist the fistula on the stomach of his son, Mohammad. The condition causes Mohammad to have trouble urinating, oftening soiling his clothing, and Rasheed can't afford the surgery necessary to fix it.
Hands caked in mud, a pilgrim circumnavigates the Chandragup mud volcano.
Evelyn (centre), the mother of Jessica Catiis, weeps at her funeral. Evelyn and the rest of Jessica’s family sent her off with yellow flowers and white balloons. Catiis was a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia who allegedly died by suicide. Her body was sent back seven months later.
Catch a hummingbird. Kill it. Wrap it in underwear, cover it with honey—and sell it to arouse passion in a lover. The confiscated hummingbirds shown here are part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s reference collection to facilitate identification of newly seized birds intended to be sold as love charms called chuparosas.
A Maasai girl bounces on the carcass of a 52-year-old female elephant near Amboseli National Park, which is hemmed by farms. Rangers suspect the elephant was poisoned for raiding grain stores and had her tusks removed.
At night grey reef sharks hunt as a pack in the south channel of Fakarava Atoll, in the Tuamotu Archipelago in French Polynesia. Photographer Laurent Ballesta’s team, diving without cages or weapons, counted 700 sharks.
A scalped grey-headed albatross chick on sub-Antarctic Marion Island gruesomely conveys the threat seabirds face from invasive species. For reasons not entirely understood, mice brought to the island by humans 200 years ago have begun feeding on birds at night. With no instinctive fear of this new danger, a bird will sit passively while mice nibble into its flesh, until it succumbs.
In Khuzestan Province, Masoumeh Ahmadi, 14, holds her mother’s shotgun. After a woman marries, she receives a firearm—with the approval of her husband and her father. Many women get one as a gift from their husbands after giving birth to their first son.
Irene Sonia poses in front of a 'milaya', or bedsheet—one of the few things her mother managed to bring when they fled South Sudan for Uganda.