The vast tail of a Southern right whale, photographed near Argentina in 2004.

Ask photojournalists to name a peer they admire, and Sebastião Salgado’s name is sure to crop up. The Brazilian is renowned for the long-term projects he undertakes, devoting years at a time to documenting the story of a particular people or the evolution of a certain place. Sebastião Salgado: The silent drama of photographyAs he describes in the talk he gave at TED2013, his attention to detail and his personal attachment to his subjects caused health problems that nearly killed him.

Thankfully, he didn’t give up. His most recent project is Genesis, which he describes as “my love letter to the planet” and for which he spent eight years traveling the world to photograph humans, animals and nature in their native glory. (To read more details about Salgado’s process, see this rather lovely Q&A with TED photographer Ryan Lash.) The resulting black-and-white images include the astonishing shot, above, of a Southern right whale, which he photographed in the Valdés Peninsula in Argentina in 2004. Together, the series forms the focus of a book (including a vast, two-volume edition that costs $9,000 and comes complete with a wooden stand designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando; mere mortals can pick up a hardcover version for $69.99). There’s also a documentary, Shade and Light, filmed by Salgado’s son and Wim Wenders, and exhibitions in cities around the world.

The scale is appropriate. This is truly breathtaking work. And, for all that the scenes Salgado captures will likely feel alien to most of us, the images are imbued with no less than the spirit of humanity. If that sounds overblown, seriously, check these out:

An iceberg photographed on the Antarctic Peninsula. Note the “castle tower,” at top right, apparently carved in the ice by wind erosion. (2005.)

Waura Indians fish in the Puilanga Lake near their village in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state. (2005.)

The Mursi and the Surma women in Ethiopia are, Salgado says, the last women in the world to wear lip plates. It’s unclear precisely why or how this custom evolved, but it is a mark of women of high birth. (2007.)

Teureum is the leader of the Mentawai clan, which lives on Siberut Island in West Sumatra. The shaman is preparing a filter for sago. (2008.)

Women of the Zo’é village of Towari Ypy in Brazil. (2009.)

Look, ma! No hands! Salgado photographed these chinstrap penguins on icebergs between the Zavodovski and Visokoi islands in the South Sandwich Islands, near Antarctica. (2009.)

Shot from Navajo Native American territory, this breathtaking image captures the junction of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers, at the gateway to the Grand Canyon National Park, in Arizona in the United States. (2010.)

Light streams across an elephant disappearing into the bush. Kafue National Park, Zambia. (2010.)

The Nenet people, living deep within the Yamal peninsula in Siberia, inside the Arctic Circle. (2011.)

In his TED Talk, Steven Addis shared a tradition that he and has daughter have kept for 15 years, since she was just a year old. On a father-daughter trip to New York City, the pair asks a stranger to snap a photo of them on the exact same street corner. Addis calls these photos his 15 most treasured images.

Steven Addis: A father-daughter bond, one photo at a timeYesterday, Addis and his daughter appeared on CBS News to share more about their tradition. Sabina Addis, now 16-years-old, spoke about the ritual from her perspective.

“I think it’s a really special trip. New York really laid down the foundation of the relationship my dad and I have together. We have a level of trust and comfort together that I can’t image many 16-year-olds have with their fathers,” she says. “For me, it’s really cool just to see how we’ve both grown and how different I look every single year. Each one triggers back a memory of each specific trip. It queues up a lot of memories.”

When asked how long they plan to continue this tradition, Steven Addis says, “Now it’s sacred … The plan is for the rest of, probably, my life.”

Read more about others with time-lapse photo traditions » 

How did you get from Canada to being a photojournalist in the Middle East at such a young age?

I was born in Taiwan, and my family moved to Canada long before I can remember. I grew up in Vancouver, a very multicultural city where more or less everyone I knew were immigrants who came from a far-flung corner of the world. In university, I studied languages and international relations, and so my focus in school was the Middle East, as all eyes of the world were on the Muslim world after 9/11. As part of my studies, I ended up in the Middle East as a political science student studying Arabic and Hebrew and trying to academically understand the forces that lead us to conflict. It was a time of intense turmoil in the region, so it didn’t take long to get caught up in the news.

I got into journalism because I found there was a disconnect between academia and the realities of what happened on the ground. In school we would study histories and political systems with such dispassionate analysis that the human toll of politics and conflict became lost in statistics and academic nomenclature. Seeing the troubled outcome of poor political decisions firsthand in the Middle East made me want to report on human stories, and look at how everyday citizens are affected by conflict. I began to shoot images for news wires — the Associated Press and Reuters — covering breaking news and feature stories. While I did not officially train as a photographer, I was lucky to be shooting next to some of the best photographers in the world, many of whom took me under their wing and taught me how to chase news, hone my personal vision and tell stories. I’ve been working in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia for the last few years, continuing to shoot news and long-term documentary projects, often working with The New York Times.

ABOVE: Mohamed Farah Abdi, a twelve-year-old Somali fighter for the Transitional Federal Government, holds a government position on the front lines between the Shebab in Mogadishu, April 24, 2010. BELOW: Women in Gaza mourn for their relatives during a funeral for a militant who was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Photo: Ed Ou

Even when you photograph harrowing subject matter, your images are visually very artistic. How do you balance aesthetics and narrative when you’re reporting on a story?

The perfect photo has the ability to take a singular moment and make viewers connect with the people in the frame. We live in a world where we are inundated by imagery, but strong photography balances aesthetics with storytelling value, which gives us information but draws us in to ask more questions. While we may come from different cultures, speak different languages and practice different religions, at end of the day, we are all human. So wherever I make photographs, I try to find moments that show not what makes us different, but universal moments that anybody can relate to, regardless of background. In my storytelling, I try to spend time building intimacy with subjects so the essence of their characters, their hopes, dreams, or flaws and insecurities come out — so they become the ones who are telling their own stories.

The most important thing about journalism is that our photographs serve as evidence that these events we have captured occurred. Whether it is to hold governments and armies to account for their actions, inform the public on injustices and exploitation playing out in our communities, or to create a time capsule of the defining moments in our history for future generations to look back on, they must represent the truth. Of course, “truth” is so subjective, so I spend a lot of time trying to be objective, to photograph people without judgment and without my own personal politics. It is often difficult.

Tell me about the images in Under a Nuclear Cloud. This strikes me as a quietly powerful, hidden story.

I started reading about Central Asia in university, and I realized that I knew very little about the region. The more I dug, the more I was taken aback by the scope of injustices that occurred during the Cold War. In the Semipalatinsk region of northeastern Kazakhstan, hundreds of nuclear weapons were test-detonated by the Soviet military, exposing millions of civilians to nuclear radiation and poisoning the land. Many are still affected to this day, with babies born with a high number of birth defects and conditions linked to radiation.

So I went to document the city and villages surrounding the test site. I was quickly struck by people’s perseverance and compassion, tirelessly caring for their children born with severe birth defects and handicaps. It was a very underreported issue, but an important cautionary tale that shows what happens when governments and militaries worry more about their political and military might than their own people — something that unfortunately plays out in so many ways to this day.

ABOVE: Nurse Larissa Soboleva holds two-year-old Adil Zhilyaev in an orphanage in Semey, Kazakhstan, Nov. 24, 2008. BELOW: Mayra Zhumageldina pushes her 16-year-old daughter, Zhannoor on a wheelchair in Semey, Kazakhstan, Nov. 27, 2008. Zhannoor was born with microcephalia and sixth-degree sclerosis — a twisted spine — because of exposure to high levels of radiation. The defect harmed Zhannoor’s brain development as if she were in a permanent vegetative state. Photo: Ed Ou

You were a young journalist in Egypt reporting on revolution amongst peers. Was it difficult not to become caught up in their cause so that you could report objectively?

Reporting on youth in Middle East, there is a very fine line between being an objective observer, and a peer going through the motions with them. It is one of the paradoxes of journalism, where we must report the truth with objectivity and no bias — but in order to have intimate access to people’s lives and the struggles they are going through, we need to be able to gain their trust, and live their lives with them exactly as it unfolds. By doing that, we become invested in their stories. It definitely becomes harder to be objective, which is why it is sometimes important to take a step back, or take a break from stories, so you can look back with more of a distance.

Do you think that youth generally have greater power to effect world events than those of previous generations? And what role does technology play?

I think youth movements have always been idealistic and emotional — whether they actually contribute to any kind of meaningful change is another story. Technology is definitely creating a more united front, and it is showing youth around the world that a lot of the grievances that we have are universal ones. That said, technology alone isn’t enough to create change — it merely lights the fire. It is up to youth to translate that to changing institutions from within through protest, voting a certain way or taking an active part in politics, and contributing to building a civil society that they would like to be a part of.

ABOVE: Egyptian youth (left to right) Mustafa El-Kashef, 16, Hanin Tarek, 18, Ziad Tarek, 19 (holding laptop) and Amor Eletrebi (with cigarette) use laptops, posting video they shot earlier in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, on Feb. 7, 2011. BELOW: Crowds erupt in jubilation at the news of Mr. Mubarak’s resignation in Cairo, Egypt, Feb. 11, 2011.

You were recently in Gaza reporting on the conflict there. What did you take away from that experience?

In Gaza, protracted conflict is a fact of life. Reporting in Israel/Palestine as a whole is very frustrating, because you see the extremes of how set people on both sides are in their ways, and their fear of “the other.” I am myself very torn about the politics of the situation — I can see the grievances of both sides of the conflict, Israeli and Palestinian. Neither justifies many of the actions that happen, but what’s for sure is that civilians on both sides end up paying the price for the often misguided decisions of politicians, military leaders and militants.

What is it like to be photographing in a war zone? How does this work, on a practical level?

Photographing in places of turmoil can be difficult, and there is a lot of preparation that one has to make. Safety is the top priority before heading into any conflict zone. You have to consider every variable, and imagine every situation that may occur, and have a plan in case something happens. Every situation is different, and you just need to be able to quickly adapt to anything that comes up.

I try to carry around as little as possible so I can move around quickly. In breaking news situations, I often have to photograph and send off images as quickly as possible so they can be used in print the same day, or often the same hour on the internet. It can be intensely stressful at times, juggling personal safety, being where the key moments are happening, and also being able to send off your photos. But it is also quite rewarding and humbling when your images are used to show things as they happen, and add to our collective consciousness and inform the world.

How has the TED fellowship had an impact on your life and work so far?

So far the TED fellowship has been an amazing opportunity to connect with likeminded individuals, and to find drive in inspiration through other people’s passions — even if it is in no way related to my field. While we may have been in disparate professions, I found we had a lot in common, a lot of the same aspirations, goals and, oftentimes, insecurities. It was a kind of group therapy for geeks and overachievers. I left the conference with a newfound sense of conviction in what I do, and couldn’t wait to get back to work.

At TED, we’re constantly impressed by the accomplishments of young innovators. With talks like Adora Svitak’s “What adults can learn from kids,” 12-year-old Amy O’Toole assisting Beau Lotto in “Science is for everyone: kids included,” and Thomas Suarez, who was developing apps before he could drive, we can’t help but be hopeful for the future. That is why we are thrilled to announce the third anniversary of TEDxYouthDay, a series of independently-organized TEDx events designed to empower and inspire teens and kids worldwide.

This Saturday and Sunday more than 100 TEDx events will participate in TEDxYouthDay, with youth conferences going down in 42 countries — including Egypt, Spain, India, Hong Kong, Brazil, Taiwan and the United States. A whopping 26 of these TEDxYouthDay events will be livestreamed through the TEDxYouthDay website. Additionally, more than 100 youth leaders — some as young as 11-years-old – have volunteered to report on these events, and will be writing, photographing and tweeting from events across the globe. You can follow their reporting on Twitter live on the 17th and 18th by following the hashtag #TEDxYouth.

TED will also be participating in the fun with TEDYouth in New York City, a free, day-long event for high school students. More than 20 scientists, designers, technologists, explorers, artists and performers will dazzle participants with mind-shifting stories as well as incredible lessons on what they do best. (While the in-person event is fully booked, TEDYouth will also be livestreamed for FREE on Nov. 17, from 1 to 6pm EST, and interpreted into Spanish and Arabic. Sign up for a livestream reminder notification here.)

This year’s TEDxYouthDay theme is “Dream Big…Then Do It!” For the past month, youth from around the world have been sharing their big ideas for a better world. Here, some selections from the TEDxYouthDay photo campaign, for which young people completed the sentence, “A dream that I commit to making real is…” The breadth, depth, and creativity of these answers have astonished us — like the answer above from Instagram user shenjustshen – and we can’t wait to see what these dreamers will accomplish.

Also from Instagram user shenjustshen, a TEDxYouthDay participant writes that her dream is “to show the world that there is no such thing as perfection in art.”

A participant from TEDxYouth@DiscoveryCollege says he hopes to be the first man on Mars and Pluto.

TEDxYouthDay reporter Serena Chao shares her dream, to stay true to herself.

A TEDxParkCityDaySchool team member shares his dream, “Finding a enjoyable and successful job.”

Instagram user sritahereje says she commits to the “spread of creative messages.”

A participant of TEDxYouth@DiscoveryCollege shares her dream: “To prove everyone wrong.”

TEDxYouthDay Reporter Jahbari Wallace aims high with his dream, filling in the sentence with the words “doing the right thing in every situation.”

A TEDxParkCityDaySchool team members share her dream “to help stop starvation.”

This weekend, join us as we celebrate the extraordinary accomplishments and drive of our youth to keep this world an ever-incredible place. Settle down, make yourself a sandwich, and stay glued to the TEDxYouthDay website, where TEDxYouthDay events will be livestreaming throughout Saturday and Sunday.

Most people rarely feel compelled to stare at grains of sand. But when those same grains are magnified hundreds of times and rendered in three dimensions, they appear like individual pieces of colored glass crafted by a skilled artist — no two pieces the same.

In today’s TEDTalk, photographer turned microbiologist turned inventor Gary Greenberg introduces us to the micro world, revealing the hidden wonder of everyday objects in nature as seen close-up using his high-definition, 3D microscopes.

“It’s a magical world beyond reality,” says Greenberg in this talk from TEDxMaui.

In the talk, Greenberg shows us what a bee’s eye look likes when magnified, how human nerve cells look as they fire, and what the stamens in flowers appear like to bugs.  But he spends the most time on his recent obsession — sand. For his book A Grain of Sand, Greenberg photographed samples around the globe, from Bermuda to Japan. (The image above is sand from Maui.) These photos make you realize that, when you take a long walk on the beach, you are walking over thousands of years of geological history. Greenberg even shows close-ups images of dust from the moon — which appear like woven crystals — procured by NASA’s Apollo 11 Mission.

In honor of Greenberg’s work, here are eight talks that give other unexpected views of nature.

Louie Schwartzberg: Nature. Beauty. Gratitude.
Louie Schwartzberg is not content to let us pass by the wonders of nature without taking a movement to be thankful. In this talk from TEDxSF, Schwartzberg shows his amazing time-lapse images of flowers blooming — which can take a month to film. “Theirs is a dance I will never tire of,” he says. “Their beauty immerses us with color, taste and touch.”

Frans Lanting: The story of life in photographs
“Nature is my muse,” says Frans Lanting as he describes his attempts to photograph the places where earth’s evolution began. In this talk from TED2005, he shares striking photographs of what our surroundings looked like before the oceans formed and before the exhale of oxygen.

Edward Burtynsky photographs the landscape of oil
If Frans Lanting photographs the “before,” Edward Burtynsky photographs the “after” — how humans have altered and ravaged the earth. He chalks up the majority of these modifications to nature to one thing: oil. At TEDGlobal 2009, he shares large format photographs of our drilling, production and automobile use, sounding a warning bell about peak oil.

Nick Veasey: Exposing the invisible
Nick Veasey captures images of ordinary sights — people, animals, familiar objects — but he does so in an extraordinary way: using X-ray photography. Most inspired by nature, Veasey shows us our surroundings from the inside out at TEDGlobal 2009.

Karen Bass: Unseen footage, untamed nature
Karen Bass records the previously inaccessible parts of nature. Traversing the remotest parts of the globe by helicopter for weeks at a time, Bass uses new technology to show the world recently discovered species while also solving the mysteries of nature. At TED2012, she shows the astonishing nature footage she’s shot for the BBC and National Geographic.

Reuben Margolin: Sculpting waves in wood and time
Mimicking the beauty of nature, Reuben Margolin sculpts massive structures — like one that imitates the landing of two raindrops next to one another and another that emulates the collision of waves. In this talk from TED2012, he describes the mechanisms and inspirations behind his art.

Camille Seaman: Haunting photos of polar ice
Who knew that icebergs and glaciers have personalities? In this talk from TED2011, TED Fellow Camille Seaman shows her stunning photographers, which somehow humanize massive bodies of ice. As they document the beauty of polar regions, they also highlight a tragedy — that glaciers and icebergs are melting, some giving up quickly and others fighting the good fight. (As a bonus, make sure to watch James Balog’s wonderful talk, “Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss.”)

Louie Schwartzberg: The hidden beauty of pollination
Pollination is an intimate dance between honeybees and flowers. In this talk from TED2011, Louie Schwartzberg gives us an up-close look, showing high-speed footage from his film “Wings of Life.”

JR’s art isn’t meant to be hung in an ornate frame in a museum or gallery. For more than a decade, the street artist has printed poster-sized photographs and pasted them on city walls to dramatic effect, always with a social point in mind. JR has pasted images of the teens living in housing projects on the streets of Paris, and tiled images of Israelis and Palestinians side-by-side on Israel’s separation barrier. In 2008, he dotted cityscapes of Brazil, India, France, Kenya and Cambodia with haunting portraits of women’s eyes.

In 2011, JR was selected for the TED Prize and was granted $100,000 to enact one wish to inspire the world. His wish, as described in this moving TEDTalk: that people around the globe have a chance to show the world their true face. And thus he founded Inside Out, a worldwide participatory art project whereby anyone can take a photograph, upload it to the website, and have a poster-sized version sent to them in the mail, to be pasted in their own community. As of today, over 100,000 posters have been printed through the project and pasted in over 110 countries globally.

The scene above can be seen in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Sending in this image to Inside Out, the creators of the mural explained the meaning behind their project. “We want to show a traditional community of Brazil in the metropolitan of Belo Horizonte. They form a group of the black resistance to slavery in Brazil and they survive by performing at its traditional festivals,” they say. “The community named Irmandade do Rosário de Justinópolis is in the city of Ribeirão and stands out because of poverty and urban violence.”

Below, check out seven more recent Inside Out projects.

Inside Out is very excited to have recently shipped these images to Beijing. The project organizers wrote, “Youth is the future. Through the eyes of the young adults from Taiwan and the Mainland, we may see the possible future relationship across the strait.”

In this short documentary uploaded in April, members of Armidale Australia’s native aboriginal community, explain why they wanted to be a part of Inside Out. Watch as they paste up posters by the light of sparklers.

This recent large-scale action in Charleroi, Belgium, focuses on the power of the smile.

Inside Out was excited to recently receive this image of posters on the streets of South Korea , featuring residents of North Korea.

Despite being behind bars, these 15 women incarcerated in prison in Medellin, Colombia, became part of the project. In this video uploaded in June, see who they are — and what they plan to do when they’re released.

This brick wall in Newburg, New York, was recently decorated with posters. The team behind the project explains, “We want to celebrate the people of the city of Newburgh, who live with hope, determination, courage and faith to meet the challenges of a community laden with poverty and crime, and support each other to rise above.”

This week, Inside Out shipped over 100 posters to Managua, Nicaragua, for a project focusing on residents there. The organizers write, “Despite past wars, dictatorships, earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes, Nicaraguans take every opportunity to smile, smile, smile and smile.”

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While JR was awarded $100,000 for his TED Prize project, this year the cash prize has been raised to $1 million. And the deadline to nominate someone is quickly approaching. From now until August 31, head to the TED Prize nominations page to recommend a mentor, idol, colleague, teacher, parent, friend — even yourself — for the 2013 TED Prize. We are looking high and low for a visionary leader with a beautiful, actionable wish and know that you, the TED community, will be an invaluable source for inspiring ideas.

One of the two photographers who worked this year’s TEDGlobal, Duncan Davidson, shares his notes on TED photography. If you’re curious about some of the “people not seen” at TEDGlobal, the backroom elves who make things appear on the web by magic, read on:

Let me tell you, I’ve seen my fair share of workflows and this one is right up there at the top as far as all the requirements pulling at it. Public web distribution via Flickr, team blog support, and news distribution. I wish I could say that some single tool just made this easy, but when it’s at this level, it’s not about tools anymore.

Read “It Takes a Team to Photograph a TED” >>

Above: Stefan Sagmeister and Gordon Brown at TEDGlobal 2009. Oxford, UK, July 21-24, 2009. Credit: TED / Robert Leslie

Please take off your name tag. This is self-explanatory enough.

Read all 8 tips >>

See more of Duncan and Asa’s work in the TED2009 photo galleries >>

We had two great editorial photographers at TED2009 in Long Beach — the brilliant Asa Mathat and James Duncan Davidson. As luck would have it, Duncan was the shooter who happened to be in the right place to catch Bill Gates’ now-famous mosquito release. Read how Duncan got the shot. In the enlargement above, it’s clear that, yes, they were real.

Photo (enlargement): James Duncan Davidson