For nearly two decades, professional surfers have been flocking to Teahupoo, a small village on the southwest coast of Tahiti. The location seems obscure, but according to some, the waves there are legendary.

“It holds one of the most powerful and perfectly artistic waves in the world,” writes Tahiti-based photographer Ben Thouard.

For a few years, he has been photographing an annual surfing contest that convenes there in August — and this year will be no exception. In anticipation, he has already started publishing photos to Surfer Mag.

For Thouard, the ocean came first, then photography. Born and raised in the south of France, he remembers spending every holiday and weekend on a sailboat with his father. His first encounter with waves was on a body board at age 8. After that, he says, “I could not stop thinking about waves … I love the feeling of water moving and rolling. It’s a different world underwater.”

Teahupoo: A Surfer’s Mecca, A Photographer’s Muse

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Ben Thouard

Pete Pin was born in Khao-I-dang, a refugee camp on the border of Cambodia and Thailand. Fleeing the infamous “killing fields” of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime, his family eventually resettled in Stockton, Calif., in the mid-1980s. What started with a single portrait of his grandmother has evolved into a deeply personal project that aims to explore the Cambodian diaspora.

His grandmother survived Pol Pot and the killing fields, and after having her portrait taken in 2010, she unexpectedly felt compelled to share her story. “I felt that my camera created this safe place that enabled the conversation to happen,” says Pin. “The stories that my grandmother told me explained a lot about my family.”

Pin is hoping to reach older Cambodians, but also younger generations who may not be familiar with their family’s history and experiences under Khmer Rouge. His goal is to use photography to create an open dialogue within the Cambodian community.

Documenting Life Beyond The Killing Fields

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Pete Pin

Currently, more than 95 percent of Japan’s racehorses are born and raised in the southeast of Hokkaido, an island in northern Japan. The region was known for its war horses until the early 1900s. The intensity of competition at the horse races increased to the point that the new motto is “Losers must disappear.” Because of this competitive climate, about 90 percent of horses born with any kinds of defects are transformed into cat food, dog food and food for human consumption. Through this project, I hope to bring awareness to the life and use of horses in Japan.

Hajime Kimura is a Japanese photographer who was born in 1982. He studied at the Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo. Since 2006 he has been actively photographing in Asian countries, including China, India and Japan. He was most recently listed as an honorable mention in the FotoVisura grant for outstanding personal photography project. More of his work can be found on his website and on FotoVisura.com.

100 Words: Life And Death Of A Japanese Racehorse

Photo Credit: Hajime Kimura

In a poor city in a poor country on a poor continent, there is a group of people with a singular purpose: to look rich.

Or, rather, to look good — and to fully embody the suave, elegant style that a wardrobe of three-piece suits, silk socks, fedoras and canes might suggest.

They are called sapeurs or members of the Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes (the Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People). And when they go out, they turn the streets of Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo, into a fashion runway.

The Surprising Sartorial Culture Of Congolese ‘Sapeurs’

Photo Credit: Hector Mediavilla/Picturetank

Diana Zlatanovski is a perfectionist — in the wonderful way that an anthropologist, photographer and museologist should be. She works with cultural artifacts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and has immersed herself in the significance of collections for a decade.

That time spent studying the intricacy of groups has inspired her photo series, The Typology: beautiful, highly detailed photographs of various collections — both the individual objects and the collections as a whole. (And she has appropriately dubbed herself The Typologist.)

“There are many so fascinating objects in the world, some things we see everyday and might not even notice,” she says. “However, if you bring enough of them together, they start to tell a story and grab your attention.”

One Of These Shells Is Not Like The Others

Photo Credit: Diana Zlatanovski 

Todd McLellan must have a lot of fun at his job.

How else to explain someone who meticulously dismantles, then painstakingly rearranges hundreds of tiny parts of machinery. And that’s before he throws everything into the air.

The Toronto-based commercial photographer was the kind of kid who always took things apart, including an entire 1985 Hyundai Pony in secondary school. He said that if an object interested him, it would soon be in pieces.

“I’ve always had a technical grounding trying to figure out how things work,” he said in a phone interview.

That fascination followed him into adulthood, when he decided to disassemble 50 design classics for his book Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living. The objects range from modern “smart” technology to older things that he collected on the street and at thrift shops. He looked for objects that were outdated but still functioned.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, all this technology still works,’ ” he said.

To photograph the objects, he first tried conventional portraits but found the results “boring and stuffy.” Eventually he decided to take the objects completely apart and lay out all of the pieces on a white backdrop.

Things Come (Very, Very) Apart

Photo Credit: Todd McLellan/Courtesy of Thames & Hudson

Before the age of computers and vinyl printers, sign painters worked by hand to illustrate storefronts, billboards and banners. Local craftsmen often developed a signature style that could distinguish a neighborhood, or even a city.

But technology made creating signs less expensive — and less expressive. Sign Painters, a new book and documentary written and directed by Faythe Levine and Sam Macon, focuses on dozens of artists who are keeping the art alive.

Before Macon began working on the film, he said never thought much about sign painting.

“I had never really given any thought to the fact that this is someone’s job, and the fact that individuals across America were painting signs regionally that defined the way the United States looked,” Macon told NPR’s Neal Conan.

Once word got out about the project in the sign-painting community, they were flooded with personal stories. “We were totally inundated in the best way, and we ended up having more content than we could track down,” Macon said.

‘Sign Painters’: A Close-Up Focus On An Endangered Art

Video Credit: Faythe Levine & Sam Macon

Elie Gardner and Oscar Durand moved to Lima, Peru, in 2010, and every time they flew in or out, they noticed a large farmland by the airport. The husband and wife photojournalists began to wonder why there was so much land in the middle of an urban area, and who lived there, and why.

One night they saw a story about it on the news. The government was taking back the neighborhood called “El Ayllu,” and relocating 350 families in order to expand the airport.

In Incan times “ayllus” were small, self-sufficient communities known for their collective labor and kinship. Gardner and Durand learned that this particular piece of land was once home to the grand Hacienda San Agustin that belonged to one of Lima’s most powerful and rich families. Some of the buildings dated back to the 16^th century.

The two decided to make portraits of the residents and their homes to document a small piece of Lima’s history before it was permanently destroyed.

A Historic Community Dismantled In Peru

Photo Credit: Elie Gardner and Oscar Durand

When Harry Gamboa Jr. saw Chicanos in the mainstream media, he didn’t see himself, or the people he knew. And he wanted to change that.

Growing up during the 1960s Chicano movement, the Los Angeles-based artist resented how Chicanos were often portrayed, he says. His photo series Chicano Male Unbonded was his response.

“What was used in the media was this idea of creating inferiority or guiltiness,” he says. “But these [Chicano] men had contributed to and saved my life.”

Chicano Males Stare Down Stereotypes

Photo Credit: Harry Gamboa, Jr.

Brandon Stanton decided to travel to Boston on Tuesday after one of his Facebook followers suggested he take his signature portrait-plus-anecdote style to the community coping with tragedy.

“I didn’t come to depict a city in crisis,” he said over the phone, “but to depict the vast majority of the city that is … getting back on its feet and getting back to normal.”

Stanton, 29, is the founder of Humans of New York, a photography project documenting the life of everyday people in New York City. He has dubbed this week “Humans of Boston.”

Finding Comfort In Portraits Of Bostonians

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Brandon Stanton/HONY