Thanks to Enri Canaj for this heartfelt story.

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Breezy Point, Queens, November 4, 2012 © Natan Dvir

Over the course of five days beginning October 22, 2012, a storm developed in the Caribbean Sea that would ultimately kill at least 286 people in seven countries. Hurricane Sandy hit New York on October 29, and New York-based Natan Dvir photographed the immediate aftermath. The Weather Channel recently sent Natan back to the exact locations, at similar times of the day, to show what has happened since.

Some of Natan's photographs are on show as part of 'Rising Waters,' an exhibition on now through March, 2014, at the Museum of the City of New York.

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Award-winning photographer Natan Dvir was born in Israel, and now lives in New York. He "focuses on the human aspects of political, social and cultural issues." Dvir is widely published and exhibited in the US and abroad.

© Subrata Biswas

Calcutta-based photographer (and painter) Subrata Biswas returned from Muzaffarnagar and posted some images on Facebook. I was fortuitously online, and Subrata agreed to a feature about this sad series of events.

"On 27th August, 2013, two Jat brothers of a girl kill a Muslim man for stalking their sister and later the stalker's family kills both of them. This revenge killing sharpens the communal violence in Muzaffarnagar in Western Uttarpradesh. The two Jat brothers are beaten to death by a gang of agitated Muslims when they go to talk to the family of the stalker in Kawaal, an interior village in Muzaffarnagar. Following the high tension of these brutal murders, situation escalates into a major communal riot claiming about 45 lives and injuring many. Many Muslims have fled away. Kawaal which was populated by Muslims and Hindus in equal numbers was now a Hindu-majority village. In fact Kawaal is not the only village in Muzaffarnagar to have witnessed such communal violence and a resulting transformation in population. In all villages where the Hindus were predominant, the Muslims have left their homes. And the reverse has happened in Muslim majority villages." Subrata Biswas.

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Read more about the riots.

Prolific portraitist William Coupon's 'Social Studies Part One: Capturing Culture: The World's Tribes' features images from over three decades of shooting around the globe.

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Bonus: Here are a few images from The New Wave and Punk, New York, 1979.

A photographer attempts to lessen the horrendous stench of Yellowstone National Park's thermal vents by making beautiful images of them. 

"My daughter and I took a road trip out to Yellowstone in May of 2012, hoping to see some wolves. We saw bison, elk, deer, antelope, moose, mountain goats, coyotes, black bears, grizzly bears, all up close, but only one very fleeting glimpse of a pair of wolves several hundred yards away."

"Yellowstone is a unique place; a microcosm so rich and varied that pictures can't possibly do it justice. The thermal features are other-worldly - the sight of elk and bison at sunrise, picking their way through fields of rock and vegetation, punctuated by steaming thermal vents, patches of snow, and divided by impossibly lurid streams and pools, completely oblivious to our presence, was something I'll never forget. The contrast between the hyper-saturated colors of both the water and the stream beds, and the sometimes overpowering, acrid stench of the gas escaping from thermal vents was what moved me to take these pictures. In my mind, somehow they balanced each other out."

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© Jason Florio

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Prints from the expedition will be on-view at Photoville, in Brooklyn Bridge Park, September 19 - 29, 2013.

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I had the great pleasure of being invited to New York's School of Visual Arts Master of Professional Studies in Digital Photography thesis review, where, among other interesting youngsters, I met Masha Ermak and was taken with her project, 'Strangers.'

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Pezhman Zahed is an Iranian-born, UK-based artist who recently graduated with a BA in photography from Brighton University. "My practice incorporates economic data and examines the possibility of translating non-visual data into visual forms."

Pezhman describes his engrossing, ambitious project: "Growing anti-western sentiment stemmed from five decades of struggle with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the reluctant involvement in two world wars, followed by a plot to topple the most popular government in Iranian contemporary history, resulting in the 1979 Islamic Revolution."    

"The photographs demonstrate excited fluids under the effect of sound waves with particular frequencies. The figures used to generate the frequencies correspond to the company's net profits, royalties to Iran and (if applicable) British taxes, in nine most critical years of the company's 42-year long activity in Iran prior to the nationalization. Accompanying the photographs are excerpts from declassified documents and found images related to the events immediately before and after Operation Ajax (the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in a CIA/MI6-backed coup d'état in 1953)."

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'Fifi' smokes an argileh water pipe at a cafe in St. Paul, MN, 2012. "I talk a lot when I smoke, but it's fun to do when we girls get together." Many parents don't approve of their daughters going out, but they find ways around the rules. © Alex Potter

View the full screen magazine photo feature on Somalis in Minnesota.

Here's a bonus, a sample from Alex's work in Yemen:

Yemeni women spray graffiti on barrier walls leading to the Presidential Palace, demanding the former president be brought to justice, Sana'a, Yemen, 24 December, 2012. The Arabic eventually reads, ليعدم عفاش, meaning "Afash (Saleh's nickname) to be executed"