This photograph, dated 1880, shows Chinese children in a procession in the Tjap Go Meh Festival in Makassar, the largest city on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Tjap Go Meh is a Chinese festival that takes place 15 days after the Chinese New Year and marks the beginning of spring. It is also known as the Lantern Festival. People celebrate with parades and performances, such as acrobats.

In this image, a child dressed in festive costume sits under an umbrella while riding a fantasy animal with long ears mounted on a cart. Other children wearing costumes with conical hats and false beards pull the cart with ropes. The decorations appear to be made of paper maché, straw, and fabric. Tjap Go Meh was widely celebrated among the many Chinese immigrants in Indonesia, and the festival became popular with the local Buddhist and Muslim population as well. The festival was banned for many years, but has made a comeback in cities such as Jakarta as an expression of ethnic and religious diversity. The photograph is the product of a professional studio in Batavia (Jakarta) founded by Britons Walter Bentley Woodbury (1834-1885) and James Page, expatriates from Australia who emigrated to the Dutch East Indies in 1857. The Woodbury & Page studio made portraits of wealthy Europeans and local elites, but also traveled in the countryside to create ethnographic images and photograph the variety of life in the Dutch East Indies.

The photograph shows boys in Diepsloot Township, Johannesburg, South Africa, and one of the rolling toy creations with which the photo shows them playing. These elaborately designed constructions are made from discarded aluminum or steel, soft drink cans, plastic processed food tubs, and water bottles. The material that holds them together is ordinary wire such as coat-hangers. The fanciful constructions do not merely piece together ready-made components. They are often cut with scissors so as to transform found materials into more fanciful, decorative and dynamic parts. Paint or some type of pigment seems to have been added to the bottle that forms the body of the vehicle, which is embellished with fringe-cut cans in the manner of a chimney or headlamp, and the margarine-tub trailer has a similar fringed can on the rear. The makers have given attention to color, form, movement and functionality in these toys. The children themselves collaborate or even compete in the construction of these toys. The photograph is from C is for Candy, the design blog by Candy Chang, photographer, designer, artist, and urban planner in Helsinki, Finland, who travels widely to collect innovative ideas about design and urban spaces, and is a 2009 TED Global Fellow.

Minidoka incarceration camp, near Twin Falls in southern Idaho, was one of 10 incarceration camps run by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) that held citizens and non-citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. The 33,000 acres of arid desert were dominated by sagebrush, and residents contended with a harsh climate and poor living conditions. The camp was open from August 10, 1942, to October 28, 1945. The peak population was 9,397, from Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. Schools in the WRA camps were staffed by Caucasian employees and Japanese American detainees, who were paid much less than their white co-workers. Students were taught principles of U.S. democracy as part of the curriculum, and they recited the pledge of allegiance like children living in freedom. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 that provided for a presidential apology and partial monetary redress for the unjust incarceration.

This photo shows a wall covered in "tags" and "throws" along a commonly-traveled side street that runs through the SoHo area of Manhattan, which is one of New York City's major museum and art gallery districts. Tags were the first form of graffiti art, originated in the late 1960s, and are linear signatures quickly written with spray paint and markers, usually taking 15 seconds or less to complete. The larger works are 'throws" (or "throw-ups"), large initials or names quickly spray-painted in a light color with a dark outline in a "bubble" letter style, usually taking a minute or less to complete. Tags and throws are usually the first forms that a new graffiti artist attempts to master, but they are also intended to maintain an artist's competitive visibility.

As with rooftops and schoolyards, street-level buildings became a common place for graffiti artists to paint after the painting on the subways was contained in the mid-1980s. Like the sides of the subway trains, the walls became a visual record of an ongoing competition and conversation among graffiti writers. The streets are the most risky place for writers to work, hence the necessity of quickness in execution, and it also explains why there are very few of the more elaborate pieces visible in most areas of the city.

A main goal for almost all graffiti artists is to be seen by other artists or appreciative peers, as well as the typical New York City passers-by. In the mid-1980s, after more than 15 years effort, the New York City Transit Authority was successful in preventing painted trains from circulating through the subway system. Since their works could no longer circulate through the city on subways, many graffiti writers turned to the walls to maintain visibility. Along with bridge works, highway retaining walls, schoolyards, and handball courts, rooftops became a favored "spot," particularly those along the elevated subway lines.

This photograph, taken from a subway platform in Queens, shows two elaborate pieces on a rooftop, with other works in the distance. Like most graffiti art, rooftops are usually painted at night in the company of friends who keep watch for police. In a densely-packed city like New York, the rooftops are often connected along the entire block, allowing artists to move easily from one to the other.

From left to right, this photograph shows four graffiti artists at work on a collaborative "production" in a Bronx schoolyard: DEATH, NIC 1, MEX, and NOX. A "production" is a planned, multi-artist work typically unified by a visual theme in the background that is usually painted last, after each artist has finished with their name. The artist who organized this production whitewashed the wall the evening before, and for this production, also produced official-looking (but false) documents with signatures stating that the artist had the school principal's permission to paint. The documents were enough to convince three separate police squads that drove into the yard during the seven-hour painting event.

Although some artists sketch their works on paper before executing them on a wall, most improvise on the spot unless the work is accompanied by "characters" (figures, often borrowed from popular culture sources like movies and comic books). A sketch of a "Karate Kid" character can be seen on the far left work, near the fellow in the red shirt. Also, the sketch and fill-in process of creating larger pieces is evident in the two works-in-progress on the left (DEATH and NIC 1). Note that the production is a social event, with friends and admirers (and their children) watching, and a boom box playing music.

In graffiti artists' terminology, this work is called a "masterpiece," or more commonly, a "piece." It was painted on a Brooklyn high school's retaining wall in the mid-1990s, and was one among about 50 such works in the schoolyard (sections of the adjoining pieces can be seen at the ends). This piece is approximately 20 feet long by 6 feet high, and probably took the artist about 3-4 hours of steady work and about 4 to 6 cans of spray paint to complete.

Rather than write their "birth" names, graffiti artists design a new name for themselves, usually based on the visual qualities of the letters and/or puns and cultural associations of the selected word. Illegibility can be a measure of skill, demonstrating the artist’s ability to creatively distort letters to produce abstract and unexpected (but striking) visual patterns. Many graffiti artists working in this more abstract mode are known by their individual "style," even if few can read the words they write.

This postcard, from the early 20th century, shows a group of women and children, most likely belonging to the Mapuche people. The Mapuche occupied a large area in the cone of South America, the territory of the current nations of Chile and Argentina. Indigenous American tribes were popular subjects for postcards around the turn of the 20th century, and a large subgroup of postcards portrayed babies in cradleboards—called "papooses."

One of the women is holding a cradleboard upright in front of her, and another is holding a young girl by the hand. The use of cradleboards was widespread among indigenous American ethnic and tribal groups. With variations in the shape of the board, the use of fabrics and lacings to bind the child onto the board, and the arrangement of the protective hoods, cradleboards display remarkable uniformity across North and South America. One postcard legend described this variation on the worldwide practice of swaddling infants: "the Cradle of the Indian children consists of a board made of slats, with hood of same material or wicker. the youngster being bound with bands there to uncomfortable in appearance yet the children seem fat and happy. they are usually carried on their mothers back wrapped in a bright shawl.[sic]"

The postcards—some with black-and-white or color-retouched photographs, and others as color lithographs—often featured captions intended to be humorous, such as "An Embryonic Warrior" or "Snug as a Bug in a Rug." One postcard of a Navaho papoose from the popular publisher Fred Harvey contained a printed legend commenting on indigenous American childrearing practices: "The Navaho child is seldom punished for the simple reason that he seldom requires it. There appears to be a bond of sympathy and love between parent and child which is very strong during the minority of the child, but strange to say the children do not always love and protect their parents when the latter become old and infirm."

These photographs are among a series of fifteen taken in 1945 by U.S. soldier Glenn S. Hensley. Hensley was a professional photographer participating in aerial surveillance of Burma for the U.S. Army. The images illustrate an encounter between Hensley and four fellow U.S. airmen with the residents of the village of Kharagpur, West Bengal. Some of the photographs have significant annotations that reveal how they and the people they encountered felt about their interactions. The airmen had access to darkroom facilities, so they were able to show the results of the encounter to Mukta and her father, whom they report as being very proud. The response of the other villagers is shown in their gathering at the scene. The collection of nearly 600 photographs and notes were prepared by Hensley for his wife to use in teaching world history courses in Missouri during World War II.

The photographs depict a Hindu cremation site, or burning ghat, in the city of Calcutta in 1944. The first photo shows the men of the family, including the deceased's sons, seated in front of the corpse, which lies shrouded and bedecked with flowers on a bier. The child sitting on one of the men's laps at the head is the youngest son, a child of no more than 4-6 years old. The photographer, U.S. airman Robert Keagle, stated that it was the duty of the youngest to light his father's funeral pyre. In the first photo the boy is wearing a shirt and some form of waist covering. In the second photo, the boy's head has been freshly shaven and he wears a white loin cloth. The photographer's annotation states that the turbanned man assisting the young child is his grandfather. The photographs are two in a series of over a half-dozen photographs taken on the same occasion by three different servicemen. This fact requires the viewer to imagine what is outside the camera's viewfinder; at least three foreign servicemen in uniform are snapping pictures of the same solemn scene, which appears to proceed as if no outsiders were present. Further, the photographer's annotation states, “Family assembles for photo with deceased relative before cremation at burning ghat.” The presence of the foreigners may have added a very untraditional element to the ritual occasion. We do not know whether the family received a print of the photos. These U.S. servicemen were stationed in South and Southeast Asia during World War II, were reconnaissance photographers for the military who often accompanied one another on photo excursions among civilians, and had access to darkroom facilities. Keagle stated that the prints were shipped home to the United States as personal possessions of the photographer.