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Photography

GRAND PRIZE WINNER Puerto Vallerta, Mexico • Photographed July 2003 "Just as I snapped the shutter," says Williams, a trumpet player, "this kid ran into the picture.... Wow! I knew I had something very special. It was almost spiritual like going up a stairway to heaven."

1st Annual Photo Contest Winners and Finalists

See the winning photos from our 2003 contest

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Profile in Courage

Fifteen years later, a photograph of an anonymous protester facing down a row of tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square still inspires astonishment

This image of the Sun's outermost layer, or corona, was taken June 10, 1998, by TRACE (Transition Region and Coronal Explorer). The Earth-orbiting NASA spacecraft, launched two months earlier, has an unobstructed view of the Sun eight months of the year. It is helping to solve the mystery of why the Sun's corona is so much hotter (3.6 million degrees Farenheit) than its surface (11,000 degrees Farenheit). TRACE is also shedding light on solar storms, which damage satellites and disrupt power transmissions.

Celestial Sightseeing

From Triton’s active geysers to the Sun’s seething flares, newly enhanced images from U.S. and foreign space probes depict the solar system as never before

Lord Tennyson

Eminent Victorians

Julia Margaret Cameron’s evocative photographs of Lord Tennyson and other 19th-century British notables pioneered the art of portraiture

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Picture This

Five Categories, 50 Finalists, Six Winners

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Shoot, Don’t Call

Announcing our first-ever photo contest

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Machine Dreams

A new exhibition reconsiders the industrial photographs of Margaret Bourke-White’s early, “rapturous” period

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The Big Picture

Our photographic collections showcase the world from the seafloor to the stars above

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Grim and Beautiful

Learning to love complexity

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No Place Like Home

The Blue Lagoon

Eye in the Sky

A French photographer’s aerial portraits of Iceland’s Blue Lagoon, cotton bales in Ivory Coast, a tulip field in Holland document a world of fragile beauty

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Heroes Then and Now

The carcass of a cargo ship, already sheared of its forward structure, sits where it was parked on the beach at Chittagong, Bangladesh, flanked by two other scrapped vessels in various states of dismemberment.

Multiple Viewpoints

Photographer Edward Burtynsky’s politically charged industrial landscapes are carefully crafted to elicit different interpretations

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Shades of Merriment

Robert Capa, famous for his battle photographs, made friends along the way

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Cavendish, Vermont 1981 What did the Russian author like about the United States? "[He] told me the air was free in America," Benson recalls.

Cheeky Charmer

For half a century, photographer Harry Benson has been talking his way to the top of his game

Two wives alternate the responsibility for preparing meals, which involves making the fire, grinding the grain and preparing ngome, breakfast cakes of pounded millet or rice, salt and oil. The cakes are also sold.

What’s for Dinner?

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The Thousand-Yard Stare

A Lens on the Land

Twelve noted photographers respond in images to areas designated by the Nature Conservancy as Last Great Places

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Finding the Eye of the Whirlpool

Adventure photographer Peter McBride tells what it was like to shoot whirlpools while hanging from a ship’s radio antenna.

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Preacher on the Go

Tiny Smith Island has three churches but only one pastor, who gets around by boat and Golf Cart

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