With her latest project, “Echoes,” the Norwegian photographer and mother of two continues exploring the passing of time.

She journeyed to the remote fishing villages of Lofoten in northern Norway, which were settled thousands of years ago in the early Viking Age.

Beginning about 1950, the Norwegian government instituted a plan to pay villagers to leave their homes for more centralized locations in an effort to modernize its society after World War II.

“Within months, some villages were totally abandoned,” Robinson said.

During her first visit in January 2011, she met an elderly couple who spent their early childhood in Bunesstranda and Vinstad. Their stories of survival in the unforgiving and isolated environment of Lofoten intrigued Robinson.

She met more and more residents of pre-1950 Lofoten and began collecting historical photographs from them, along with details about when and where each image was made.

“I wanted to bring life back to these places that were left so suddenly,” Robinson said. “I did that by returning historic photographs to where they once were taken, linking past and present together.”

She was able to get to five of the remote locations. A few of them were accessible by boat only at certain times of the year. To set up one shot, she had to walk in snowshoes and use a sled to carry her gear.

Robinson used two methods of juxtaposing old and new in “Echoes.” For some images, she made a large print and physically carried it to the location, placed it precisely in the scene and then photographed it.

For others, she projected the historical photograph onto a surface such as a large rock or an existing structure.

“I chose large prints of pictures that I felt reflected different sides of people’s lives,” Robinson said. “As for the projections, I could be more flexible and try different pictures on site and projections on different surfaces: a building still standing, water, stones and on the projection screen we brought.”

Some of the compositions align seamlessly, offering a window into the past. The result is a vivid look at the people of Lofoten.

“Most of all, I was intrigued by the way they handled everyday life,” Robinson said. “Hard work, winter storms, being isolated, giving birth, handling death and constant fear of losing husbands and sons out fishing in the rough sea. Some of the stories are really strong and touching.”

– Raymond McCrea Jones, CNN

The shoots aren’t designed to capture reality, and rely heavily on imagination and theatrics. The finished albums are ultimately displayed at the actual wedding ceremony as a type of status symbol.

“With the sets of the wedding studios, we can see the dreams of the Chinese,” said photographer Guillaume Herbaut, who documented several couples’ sessions that could have made Hollywood envious.

At wedding studios in Shanghai, Chinese couples can create their most romantic and lavish fantasies. Nothing is too elaborate here – whether they channel their inner Marie Antoinette in the court of Versailles or choose to escape to a snowy winter wonderland or a sun-kissed beach in Greece.

“I was fascinated by the mix of kitsch and professionalism,” Herbaut said.

One of the most prominent studios in Shanghai, the Only Photo studio, houses three floors of sets and employs 300 people, including makeup artists, hairdressers, and costume and set designers, as well as 60 in-house photographers.

Herbaut first stumbled upon the matrimonial movement when he was visiting Shanghai for a shoot with French Elle magazine.

“It was really crazy when we saw the sets,” Herbaut said.

With China’s growing population comes an increasing number of nuptials – more than 10 million couples tie the knot each year. And as China’s economy booms, so does the wedding industry, now worth an estimated $60 billion-plus.

To Herbaut, it comes as no surprise that photographers are snapping up the lucrative market.

– Sarah LeTrent, CNN

But when she first arrived, she wasn’t that impressed.

“It was very arid, not very green, not very blue,” she said. “So I go, ‘OK, where are all the beautiful spots?’

“And little by little, you go from one place to another and it’s like the incredible, beautiful spots are kind of hidden in the island.”

Moonlike rocky terrain gives way to sandy plains, immaculate beaches and towering mountains with trees growing out of the sides. The Yemeni island is only about 1,400 square miles, but it packs a lot of variety and character into that small space.

“I can have a forest with all these trees, and then half an hour later, this beach is incredible,” said Martin-Chico, a professional photographer based in Paris. “But it’s not like a normal beach because, first, it’s empty and it’s very, very wild. And the sand and the mountains are together. It’s like the sand is going up the mountain.”

Socotra has been referred to as the “Galapagos of the Indian Ocean” for its remarkable biodiversity. More than a third of its 825 plant species, 90% of its reptile species and 95% of its land snail species are not found anywhere else in the world, according to UNESCO.

Perhaps its signature species is the dragon blood tree, which resembles a mushroom or, in some instances, an umbrella. Its red resin, or “dragon’s blood,” has been used in dyes, medicines and other household products through the years.

For all of its beauty, however, not many people have visited Socotra, which is about 250 miles south of mainland Yemen, east of the Horn of Africa.

Monsoon winds can make it difficult to travel to the island in certain months, and there hasn’t been much development over the years, Martin-Chico said.

“It’s very empty and thoroughly wild – no hotels, no infrastructure built for tourists, nothing,” she said. “They built a road a few years ago that can bring you from one place to another, and that’s like a big deal. So you go there and all these beautiful spots are just empty. So you think you’re like Robinson Crusoe.”

Socotra was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008. In addition to its endemic plants, reptiles and snails, the island has 192 species of land and sea birds, including many threatened species, and diverse marine life.

About 50,000 people live on Socotra, whose name is derived to the Sanskrit for “island abode of bliss.” Martin-Chico says the people are open-minded and generally happy to see tourists because they help boost the economy.

“Yemeni people in general are very curious of who you are and how you live and which God you believe in,” she said.

Martin-Chico said the island is starting to become a more popular spot for ecotourism, which is convenient “because it’s very, very ecologic,” she laughs.

“If you want to do real ecotourism, wild tourism, this is the place to go.”

– Kyle Almond, CNN

Three years ago Hayhurst, a timid, not particularly fit 19-year-old, grew tired of seeing all this crime and others not helping.

“People were standing around and doing nothing as other people were getting mugged,” Hayhurst said, recalling why he got into the superhero business.

He learned online about self-proclaimed superheroes who would fight crime in costume, and he was inspired to do the same. He got a blue costume and cape with black armor gear, named himself the “Knight Warrior,” and started sneaking out to patrol his area late at night after his family was in bed. On patrol, he’d assess the situation and either try to stop it, or if it was serious, get the police.

Photographer Jacob Russell met him on assignment with the agency Cavendish Press. Russell was there only for an hour to get Hayhurst’s photo, but he saw more to the story.

“They wanted a look at this eccentric guy dressing up and going into the streets,” Russell said. “I thought the family situation was where the story was.”

Russell visited the Hayhursts weekly for about a year. At the time, Hayhurst lived with his mother, grandfather, and a younger and older brother. Hayhurst’s father had died years ago, and the family had money troubles, Hayhurst said.

Russell went on night patrols with Hayhurst three times but never saw him take any action. In fact, it seemed that the Knight Warrior avoided conflict. Russell wondered whether this nighttime identity was a retreat from his daily challenges.

When asked, Hayhurst agreed. “It’s a way to escape your troubles,” he said.

With time, the Knight Warrior became a local celebrity. The tight-knit community already knew Hayhurst as a sweet-natured teen, but when he was in costume, Russell said, he saw people shouting encouragement to him from cars. The community was generally supportive, though there were a few “scallies,” as young hooligans are called in the UK, who would harass Hayhurst.

The Knight Warrior became more than just a local mascot after national media picked up on his story.

Hayhurst had been patrolling nightly for about a year before his mother saw him on TV and found out about her son’s alter ego. He said she was “a bit shocked” but accepted his nighttime gig.

With the attention, Hayhurst got feedback from all kinds of fans and critics. One girl, Rebecca Wall, wrote him a letter that stood out.

“There’s Twitter, Facebook, but she took the effort to write me a letter,” Hayhurst said. “Not many people do that nowadays.”

They met on the British holiday Boxing Day, December 26, 2012. Wall went on a few patrols with Hayhurst and got her own superhero identity: the “Knight Maiden.”

Wall soon moved into Hayhurst’s home, and they have since gotten engaged.

Russell met with Hayhurst a few weeks ago after not seeing him for about a year. Partly thanks to the influence of his fiancée, and partly because he simply grew out of his teen years, Hayhurst had changed.

The former awkward, scruffy teen now had a nice haircut and was dressing better, in shirts and jeans. He hosts a radio show with Wall and has a reality TV show deal in the works.

Hayhurst and Wall have given up their superhero identities. British media reported it was because Hayhurst had gotten beaten up, but Hayhurst said he wasn’t patrolling in costume when he was attacked.

But he was being harassed by people and the media out of costume, and he didn’t want the alternate identity affecting so much of his life.

When asked if he liked the attention, Hayhurst said, “Some of it, no, because it was exaggerated. But I got opportunities I never would have had.”

The confidence he had when he was in costume has also leaked over into his everyday identity.

“I used to be really shy,” Hayhurst said. “It helped me come out and be more confident.”

He has hung up his cape, but he says he’s still in contact with the superhero community around the world.

–  Lauren Russell, CNN

Throughout her battle with breast cancer, Kerry Mansfield didn’t see any use in throwing herself a pity party. She hated to see her family and friends who surrounded her get upset.

“I didn’t want anyone to feel like they had to worry all the time, and I didn’t want to join everyone and be crying all the time,” Mansfield said. “I felt that it was my job to keep everyone else calm.”

As a private form of therapy to deal with the pain and anxiety that accompanied the changes in her body, the fine art photographer started taking self-portraits in her shower. As she posed she let herself break down, but only for one roll’s worth of photos.

“It was the only time I physically and mentally felt it,” she said. “I’d open it up like a notebook and shut it really quickly and go back to being strong.”

She underwent eight sessions of chemo, a mastectomy and two reconstructive surgeries while taking the portraits.

She had one photo session every chemo session that she tried to time to when she had enough in her to stand up. During one session, she didn’t have the energy and sat on the floor of the shower. Only her head fit in the frame.

Mansfield was a fit and healthy 31-year-old when she found a lump in one of her breasts. Medical tests later found seven tumors in her right breast and three in her left.

Even after Mansfield had a biopsy, she didn’t even consider that she could have cancer. With no family history and good health, it didn’t seem possible.

When she went to learn the results of a second biopsy, she thought it might be a good idea to have a friend come with her.

On the elevator ride up to the doctor’s office, she joked to her friend, “If we get out of the elevator and the nurse is smiling, I’m totally screwed,” she said.

When the doors opened, the nurse was smiling from ear to ear.

“When I did find out, it was pretty big shock,” she said. “I said I can’t pretend this isn’t happening anymore.”

She had a mastectomy on her right breast within three weeks of hearing the news and soon started chemo. The lumps in her left breast were removed.

Mansfield said she always had self-image issues, but the one thing she liked about herself was her breasts.

“It was really sad that that was truly going to be taken away,” she said.

But the mastectomy was nothing compared to chemo.

Because her cancer was so aggressive, she went through eight rounds of rapid-cycle chemotherapy, meaning her body was poisoned to kill the cancer every week rather than the typical three-week cycle for treatment.

After her first session, she saw her surgeon in the hallway and stopped her to say she should have been warned about how bad it would be. She said she couldn’t do it anymore. Mansfield said she’d never forget what her surgeon, who doesn’t mince words, said: “You have too much disease, I saw it,” the surgeon said. “If you don’t do the chemo, you will die.”

Her family and friends became her “cancer support team” and came with her every week during her chemo sessions. Every part of her was invested in staying alive.

“They were depending on me to get better and to not die, and it was my obligation to do that,” she said.

In the first surgery, the mastectomy, her right breast and nipple were removed, and in the second, a tissue expander was inserted to gradually stretch the skin so an implant could be put in. She’s had two surgeries since then, one to insert an implant and another to remove and replace it because the first implant was too big, but she didn’t have it in her to take more photos.

Mansfield has no family history of cancer and doesn’t have the mutated BRCA genes that increase the risk of breast cancer, so she wouldn’t have been considered for a preventive mastectomy, which Angelina Jolie had. She would have needed to know the likelihood of cancer beforehand, but she says she would have considered a preventive mastectomy had it been an option.

“If I’d seen pictures like mine and known that was the alternative, I would’ve said hell no” to the possibility of cancer and having to go through treatment, she said.

Mansfield, now 38, says she feels much older than she is. Chemo killed her eggs, and she’s now menopausal.

“Part of this has been accepting that I don’t have what my friends have,” she said. “Sometimes I’m jealous of other women’s chests.”

She says she doesn’t think she’ll ever be entirely happy with the way she looks since she never was, but she doesn’t look at her right breast and think it’s ugly.

Today, seven years since starting chemo, her hair’s just barely touching her shoulders. She has a 65% chance of getting cancer again in her lifetime, but she’s never eager for check-ups. She’s been putting off a breast check-up for months.

“Coming in and getting a clean result almost makes me nervous for next time,” she said.

–  Lauren Russell, CNN

 Mansfield’s self-portrait series, titled “Aftermath,” received an honorable mention in this year’s FotoVisura awards.

Related: Cancer: 'The battle we didn't choose'

“When I see a picture, I take it,” Terry O’Neill said. “I don’t make judgments on people.”

His goal is to preserve the dignity of people, not to make them look foolish, he said.

Almost by accident, O’Neill redefined reportage photography of stars at a time when studio photography was the norm.

Hoping to get from England to the United States to launch a career in jazz, O’Neill got a job printing pictures of plane interiors with the British Overseas Airways Corp. at the London airport in the 1950s. He started taking pictures of people at the airport on his own and caught celebrities moving through. He took a picture of singer Petula Clark putting on makeup, with curlers in her hair, at an airport coffee bar. O’Neill was hired as a newspaper staff photographer but quit after four years when he tired of covering tragedies.

From there, he moved into celebrity photography, using the Hollywood connections he had built up through meetings and assignments. He shot many of the greats of the ‘60s – The Beatles, Twiggy, the Rolling Stones, Jean Shrimpton.

“I started at the top and never looked back,” he said.

O’Neill said he and the other artists in the ‘60s thought the madness wouldn’t last.

“We all thought that it would come to a halt and we’d have to get a job one day,” he said.

The enduring presence of the Stones and Beatles in today’s pop culture shows they were wrong.

“It’s still the best music ever done,” O’Neill said.

In 1967 he followed Frank Sinatra for three weeks. O’Neill remembers him as a powerful man.

“Wherever he went the entire town revolved around him,” he said.

After writing a list of directions for O’Neill, Sinatra pretended the photographer wasn’t there.

“He gave me the greatest gift by ignoring me,” O’Neill said. “I didn’t realize it until after.”

That stayed with O’Neill for the rest of his life and shaped other long-term shoots with the likes of Clint Eastwood and Paul Newman.

Today’s celebrities wouldn’t allow that kind of access, he said, but back then he felt very welcome. With all the red tape for covering celebrities now, it’s not the show biz he grew up in, he said.

“You need approval for everything,” he said. “They’ve killed all the freedom and spontaneity about it.”

He’s still good friends with Elton John and Eric Clapton.

O’Neill said he didn’t envy his subjects.

“I’d much prefer my side of the camera,” he said. “They get isolated from the rest of the world.”

Only when he reached his 60s did O’Neill realize how incredible his career had been.

“I think God was looking for someone to photograph these people in the ‘60s and found me,” he said. “I’ve had such a great life, I can’t believe it still.”

– Lauren Russell, CNN

"Terry O’Neill," published by ACC Editions, is available at bookstores everywhere and online.

Not ostensibly visible, but these untouched oases exist – giving Earth its air, in all five boroughs, sought out and photographed by Mitch Epstein in his new book, “New York Arbor.”

The Big Apple may not be rich in trees, but it is rich in proportion to the number the city has afforded to save. Some holding roots for 300 to 400 years, taking up residence on sidewalks, parks and cemeteries, these trees are as much a part of the city as its younger yet more cowering concrete figures.

Epstein traversed the city using his analogue camera to photograph the nature in a city he rarely thought of as more than concrete.

After photographing “American Power,” a project focused on national energy production and consumption, Epstein shifted his focus to trees: a counterpoint to industry and a subject that he could “honor, rather than lament.”

In a diverse city, there lie trees imported from all over the world. “Immigrant trees,” he called them: Bald cypress trees from the southern swamps, Caucasian wingnut trees from Persia, weeping beech trees from Europe.

Not unlike the inhabitants of New York, these trees have adapted and assimilated to the harsh climate of a city that is different from their origins. Yet each tree, like each city resident, clings to some part of its original character, making New York City the quintessential mixing bowl of diversity.

Adapting to seasons, shedding leaves, shaking in the cold breeze, absorbing the rain: Epstein’s black-and-white photos allowed him to focus on the character of the trees, which would otherwise be lost to distraction in color film.  It also enabled him to follow the cycle of seasons and times of day without colors distracting from the tree itself.

“These contemporary photos display the living organisms that came before… life wasn’t just this fast, urban place,” he said.

In a decade that’s been so unsettled all over the world, it’s comforting to find something so firming, rooted and stable. Many of these trees were diplomatic gestures, pieces of history, a reflection of what one’s relationship might be to nature, or to the country endowing this breathing organism.

For Epstein, the project has led him to identify and connect with nature. He is not alone, as there is a collective critical consciousness about trees in New York.

“People really come together to keep trees from vulnerability,” he said. “All are owners of nature and responsible to be respectful of it. We all benefit from all that it gives to us.”

He adds that the connections are evident between people and nature and how communities can turn toward a tree for security.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has enlisted a campaign to plant a million trees in Gotham City, noting benefits such as better air quality, cooler temperatures, provided sanctuary and an overall healthier environment.

The infrastructure does not exist to support it, but Epstein is hoping to change that, invoking the public to see trees as more than just an obstacle in the middle of a sidewalk, but as a means to measure the depths of their own nature.

– Michelle Cohan, CNN

If not, perhaps he was clued in by the white supremacist and sheriff candidate’s first words when they met: “Hey, nice to meet you. Are you a Jew?”

McKnight, 33, was living in northern Idaho when he first decided to ask Winkler if he’d let him take photos at the Ku Klux Klansman’s compound. His photo assignments were “few and far between, and there are a lot of interesting people in my own back yard, so I just started enterprising my own projects,” he said.

The area has an ugly legacy of extremism that – judging from letters to the editor after McKnight’s photos were published in a local paper – residents in the region would like to shake.

This is where the late Richard Butler (he died in 2004) relocated in the 1970s to found the Aryan Nations. Ruby Ridge, the site of the deadly confrontation between Randy Weaver and federal agents, is also nearby.

McKnight first met Winkler, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a Butler protégé, last year at a 17-acre compound in Bonner County’s Hoodoo Mountains. There, McKnight saw a cabin foundation, three trailers – two inhabited, one for cooking – and an outhouse with no running water.

McKnight asked if he could photograph Winkler during his run for sheriff.

“He agreed. He said he wanted people to see he was a real person,” McKnight said. “We had common ground there.”

McKnight said he never spent the night on the compound – “I didn’t think my fiancée would allow it” – but he met Winkler on three occasions, the second being for a sermon, in which only his daughter and wife attended.

There, Winkler mentioned burning a cross. He called it a “cross lighting,” McKnight recalled. Naturally, McKnight asked to photograph that as well.

When the photographer arrived that spring 2012 day, the cross was already up. About 20 people – a dozen of whom Winkler said were from his “klavern,” or KKK unit – had congregated for the ritual.

“I noticed on the side of (the cross) other pieces of wood that had been burned. They were shaped like crosses, lying there,” McKnight said, adding he was shocked to learn the cross lightings were a monthly affair.

That a Klansman burns crosses is no surprise. Winkler regularly voiced his aversion to non-Anglo Saxons, whether it was demonstrating at taco stands to protest Latinos in nearby Coeur d'Alene, as Reuters reported, or by simply stating his platform during his run for sheriff.

"Most people don't know that we don't just oppose the Jews and the negroes … We also oppose sexual predators and drugs of any kind,” Winkler told a Hagadone News Network reporter, noting that if it were up to him, he’d hang sexual predators.

What struck McKnight about the cross lighting was the casual atmosphere. While attendees enjoyed barbecue, five kids – who McKnight estimated to be between 4 and 10 years old – played with BB or AirSoft guns nearby, he said.

The ritual was cast as a religious affair, which McKnight said bothered him, considering the kids present.

At dusk, Winkler and three others ignited the cloth-wrapped cross from its top and bottom, left and right, to make sure it burned evenly.

“It lit pretty quick,” McKnight said. “It was hot, too.”

McKnight, who’d been asked to stay out of the inner circle of people lighting the cross, said he felt a “wave of sadness” wash over him. He considers himself more spiritual than religious, but he prayed to God that he wouldn’t be associated with what he was seeing.

“It was so, so evil what was in front of me – that I was seeing that. I needed to put myself somewhere else,” he said.

Despite the overtly racist activity, Winkler told folks on the campaign trail that he wouldn’t let his views on race “cloud his judgment,” McKnight said.

When the primary ballots were cast in May 2012, Winkler was trounced. Of 5,543 votes cast, he pulled only 182. Still, McKnight was disturbed.

“He wanted to end the meth problem and sex assaults; he was going to string them up just like years ago in the town square,” McKnight said. “Why would anyone vote for that?”

Winkler’s property has since gone into foreclosure after he failed to pay the mortgage, according to the SPLC. McKnight, who now lives in Seattle, still keeps in touch with him, and Winkler told McKnight he was working on establishing another compound on the other side of the Priest River from his former land.

Last they spoke, Winkler was living in a hotel in Coeur d'Alene, trying to start a lawn care business.

While McKnight would like his photos shared with a larger audience to spur dialogue on race, he felt he achieved a personal goal with the project, he said.

“There are varying levels of racism, and Shaun is a 10 on it,” McKnight said. “I don’t want him to look bad. I just wanted to understand this guy better and, overall, the history of racism and why Winkler is still there 10 years after Butler’s gone.”

– Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN

Most of the resulting images had their peak of acknowledgement decorating bulletin boards or family albums, but some were considered fine art – or at least are now in retrospect.

“The Polaroid Years” is a collection of experimental works from a range of artists. Mary-Kay Lombino’s inspiration for the book came at several points.

She heard an outcry from artists and aficionados after the announcement that Polaroid would stop producing the instant film and cameras in 2008.

Also, Vassar College, where she works as a curator, received a donation of photographs Andy Warhol had taken and about 150 of them were Polaroids.

“These Polaroids went from ephemera to museum objects and were elevated to works of art,” she said she thought at the time.

She wondered if other artists had Polaroids lying around that would now be considered fine art.

Some prints, such as the self-portrait montages by Chuck Close, were made as works of art and already in museums, and other works had been largely forgotten.

For example, Joyce Neimanas made composite works in 1980, a year before David Hockney, who is best known for the technique, made his first collage.

Lombino saw in her research that there was a huge amount of experimentation with the media, and it was encouraged by the company from the start.

Scientist and inventor Dr. Edwin H. Land hired photographer Ansel Adams as the first artistic consultant in 1948. Other known artists worked on contract for Polaroid, gathering technical data and reporting it back to the corporation’s technicians in the 1950s and ‘60s.

The company would also give artists supplies on the condition that they donate works to the company’s collection.

“The company was really responding to artists’ needs and consulting with them,” Lombino said. “That’s a unique relationship that doesn’t really exist anywhere else.”

As the first and most popular brand, Polaroid has become synonymous with instant photography.

Though the 3-by-3-inch SX-70 print is by far the most known Polaroid print, the company also manufactured other print sizes. Its 40-by-80-inch camera pushed out the largest direct prints that ever existed.

Most often in terms of experimentation, Lombino saw montages and chemical manipulation.

The SX-70 print has 17 chemicals that can be manipulated to create a painterly look. Artists could change the color filter by warming or cooling the photo, or push around the chemicals as it developed.

Lucas Samaras, who pioneered experimentation in the medium, completed his AutoPolaroids series in 1971. Almost all of the 400 images were self-portraits with chemical manipulation and ink applied by hand.

Lombino saw many nude photos while going through the collections, particularly self-portraits. She guessed it was in part because the photographers didn’t have to send the naked photos to a developer or be seen working with them in a dark room.

“It’s a testament to artists feeling a lot of freedom with taking the photos,” she said. “It was the perfect medium for soft-core porn.”

Though the company is no longer making print products, the cult following can get film for certain models through the Impossible Project, which was founded by former Polaroid employees after the film was discontinued.

– Lauren Russell, CNN

Prints from “The Polaroid Years” will be on exhibit at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College until June 30. Lombino and two featured artists, David Levinthal and William Wegman, will be holding a discussion at the New York Public Library on May 15.

The poet and artist created a journal in 1938: “Yoru no Funsui” or “The Night’s Fountain,” which promoted surrealist poems, literature, ideas and art in Japanese.

Yamamoto was taken into custody by the Tokkō, the “Thought Police,” in 1939 because of the journal. The avant-garde club he joined in 1937 was also dissolved around that time. Surreal artists risked imprisonment for their work.

“War was mounting, and he could have been prosecuted at any point,” said Amanda Maddox, who curated his work for a new exhibition at Los Angeles’ Getty Museum.

Yamamoto was lucky, she said. He was never imprisoned, but he was told to discontinue writing the journal.

From that point forward, Yamamoto could commentate on the country’s government only through his art, particularly his photocompositions. His photographs include straightforward gelatin prints, combination prints with multiple negatives and multimedia pieces with drawings on top.

Influenced by the surrealist movement in Europe, Yamamoto played a large role in the avant-garde photography movement in Japan in the 1930s. His works have a cryptic title or no title at all, but the year they were created hint at their meaning.

Birdcages appear often in his works. One work created after his questioning in 1940 (image 15) shows a phone inside a cage, likely symbolizing state censorship.

“He was criticizing the government, but it was under the skin of the works,” Maddox said.

Japan’s Shōwa period, referring to Emperor Hirohito’s enthronement from 1926 to 1989, is typically divided into two parts: prewar and postwar.

At the start of his reign, Hirohito pushed the country’s development and presence around the world with fascism. He led Japan to invade China in 1937 and get involved in World War II. After Japan was defeated, Allied Powers occupied the country from 1945 to 1952.

Yamamoto was a strict pacifist, Maddox said.  He was disheartened when his government agreed to allow U.S. military occupation by signing the Security Treaty Between the United States and Japan in 1951. The treaty was renewed in 1952.

The work’s title doesn’t say what it refers to, but Yamamoto’s “Sleepy Sea” (image 16), created in 1953, features a toy gun with “Japan” inscribed on it.

During post-war Shōwa, Japan struggled to recover and ultimately made a surprising turnaround. The boom during the “Golden ‘60s” launched the nation to an economic world power. At this time, the realism photography movement had taken hold, and avant-garde photographers were more overlooked.

Yamamoto was constantly creating new work but was not a self-promoter and wasn’t well-known in Japan during his lifetime, Maddox said. A retrospective exhibition of his work in 2001 in Tokyo helped show his talents and relevance to the photography movements of his time, though he is still relatively unknown in Japan and the rest of the world.

–  Lauren Russell, CNN

Yamamoto’s works are on display alongside the works of his contemporary Hiroshi Hamaya, a Japanese documentary photographer, at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition, “Japan’s Modern Divide,” runs until August.