Curator Pablo Monasterio went through a century and a half of images to organize the book “Mexican Portraits” by recurring themes, such as lucha libre wrestling or occupational portraits. He says the country's traditions come through in the photographs.

25 years ago, Billy Howard took portraits of people with HIV/AIDS at their homes around the U.S., then gave them a print and asked them to write what it was like to live with this disease. Some took months to get it back to Howard. One man took a year. He told Howard it was because it felt like he was writing his will.

Right before photographer Theron Humphrey started a 50-state photo-project road trip, he made a stop in a Marietta, Georgia, animal shelter and adopted a puppy, Maddie. She accompanied him across 65,000 miles, quickly becoming what Humphrey describes as his best friend.

For his first personal assignment, celebrity photographer and director Matthew Rolston shot portraits of a different breed of entertainers — ventriloquist dummies. “I’m not a ventriloquism person,” Rolston said. But at the core of his celebrity photography is the human face. And these were the most fascinating faces.

After realizing he was part of the last generation who could talk to Holocaust survivors, Maciek Nabrdalik embarked on a project to document their stories. His subjects, forgetting their pictures were being taken, would recall their time in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

Denver-based photographer Matt Slaby has been documenting gun culture in Colorado since just before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that gun ownership is an individual right protected under the Second Amendment. Since then, he has photographed the wide variety of gun owners he has come across.

In Sydney’s “Wild West” suburbs live immigrants from all over the world. George Voulgaropoulos didn’t have a goal when he began photographing the western outer edges of Australia’s largest city. It’s a personal story of getting to know the immigrants and learning about their cultures.

When Wendy Sacks is taking a portrait of a child for her series “Immersed in Living Water,” the water is her paint. As a child she painted with her mother, who was an artist, and when she’s working today, she can feel the palette knife in her hands.