The Human Experience

Kitra Cahana, COLORS Magazine
Arianna Desjardin, 19, at the 2009 National Rainbow Gathering in the Santa Fe National Forest, New Mexico. Held every summer in a different U.S. National Forest, the Rainbow Gathering is a haven for train-hoppers, hobos and teenage runaways. Thirty-eight gatherings have taken place since the first event in Colorado in 1972, and as many as 30,000 people attend each year.

Kitra Cahana, COLORS Magazine
A participant at the 2009 National Rainbow Gathering in the Santa Fe National Forest, New Mexico. Despite attracting hundreds of young people each year, the Rainbow Gathering has no official leadership, no formal structure, no official spokespersons and no membership. A changing network of "focalizers" takes responsibility for passing on Rainbow information year-round.

Kitra Cahana, COLORS Magazine
Jeffrey Martin, 18, at the 2009 National Rainbow Gathering in the Santa Fe National Forest, New Mexico. Every summer, hundreds of vagabond young people attend the Rainbow Gathering, an annual festival held in a different U.S. National Forest each year during the first week in July. Many of the youth, known at gatherings as "The Dirty Kids," travel around the country during the rest of the year.

Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post
Dayvon Vaughns, 6, participates in a hip-hop dance class during the afterschool program at Fairview Elementary School in Denver, Colorado. The program focuses on low-income students, offering tutoring, mentoring, meals and recreation to children who have few alternatives. Instructor Analisa Angel says the dance class aims to increase the students' self-confidence and team-building skills.

Bruce Ely, The Oregonian
Parents join the students of Heppner High School in Oregon at the homecoming bonfire. "There's not a whole lot to do here," says Principal Daye Stone. "That's the great thing about small towns."

Brian L. Frank, Redux/Global Post
A child plays in his suburban backyard near Phoenix, Arizona. The Colorado River, a waterway stretching over 1,400 miles from its origin in northern Colorado to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, irrigates suburban Arizona. The river is a shell of its former self as overpopulation, pollution, damming, global warming and apathy deteriorate the natural habitat and the economies that once relied on its bounty.

Brian L. Frank, Redux/Global Post
The Cerro Prieto Geothermal Power Station in Baja California, Mexico, is believed to pollute a large swath of the Colorado River in Mexico. Downstream from the plant, many people rely on the water for fishing and to irrigate their crops. The U.S. purchases a large amount of electricity from Cerro Prieto, which doesn't have to abide by the same strict environmental standards as U.S.-based power plants.

Stephanie Sinclair, VII for National Geographic and The New York Times Magazine
Joe S. Jessop, a patriarch of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), with his five wives and many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the day after his 89th birthday. In April 2008, law enforcement officials raided the FLDS Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas, after receiving a call from a woman claiming to be an abused 16-year-old living there. Authorities removed 440 children, who they said had been sexually, physically and emotionally abused. After two months in state custody, two courts ruled there was insufficient evidence of abuse, and the children were returned to their parents.

Stephanie Sinclair, VII for National Geographic and The New York Times Magazine
The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), one of the largest practitioners of polygamy in the U.S., emerged in the early 1900's after splitting from the Mormon Church over the issue of plural marriages. The FLDS gained international notoriety when its leader Warren S. Jeffs was indicted in 2005 on charges of rape as an accomplice in Arizona and Utah for arranging marriages between adult males and underage girls. Jeffs fled, becoming one of the FBI's most wanted fugitives, before being arrested in August 2006. He was later sentenced to 10 years in prison in Utah and awaits trial in Arizona.

Barbara Davidson, Los Angeles Times
Thomasina Nez, 35, gives Bobbi, 4, a bath in a tin basin in their dilapidated trailer on a Navajo reservation in Cameron, Arizona. Without running water, Nez must bathe her children in water hauled from 30 miles away and heated on the family's wood stove. The "Bennett Freeze," lifted officially in March 2009, prohibited some 8,000 Navajos living on 1.5 million acres of disputed land in Arizona from erecting or repairing homes, including putting in water lines, unless approved by the neighboring Hopi Tribe. Consequently, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs says 77 percent of the homes in the area aren't suitable to live in.

Barbara Davidson, Los Angeles Times
A torn American flag flies over a cemetery in Tuba, Arizona, where Thomasina Nez's former partner and father to five of her children is buried. The Bennett Freeze ban, instituted in 1966, prohibited home and property improvements on land in Arizona that was disputed by the Navajo and Hopi tribes. The law left 1.5 million acres frozen in bureaucracy until it was reversed in March 2009.

Joshua A. Bickel, Columbia Missourian
Columbia College men's basketball coach Bob Burchard dances in the locker room following the Columbia Cougars' victory over MidAmerica Nazarene University in the national semifinals of the NAIA Division I National Championship on March 23, 2009 at Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Missouri. As the unranked Cougars continued to win throughout the tournament, Burchard told his team to "just keep riding the wave."

Elizabeth Kreutz, Freelance
Seven-time Tour de France champion and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong prepares for his comeback to competitive cycling on a training ride in Austin, Texas, September 6, 2008.

Elizabeth Kreutz, Freelance
Lance Armstrong's legs look ready to race before the start of the Tour de France in Monaco, July 3, 2009. After a four-year hiatus, the 37-year-old announced his return to competitive cycling in September 2008. Armstrong rode into Paris in third place.

Mark J. Terrill, Associated Press
Queen Latifah speaks during the memorial service for Michael Jackson at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California, July 7, 2009. Jackson died on June 25, 2009 at the age of 50 after suffering a cardiac arrest at his home in Bel-Air.

Magnus Wennman, Aftonbladet
Inga Schuenemann, 27, of Riverside, California, screams outside a memorial service for Michael Jackson at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California, on July 7, 2009. Some 1.6 million people applied for tickets to the memorial, but only 11,000 were given a spot inside the arena.

Carolyn Drake, Panos Pictures/Prospekt
One of several preserved species on display in the history museum of Aralsk, Kazakhstan, located on the site of a formerly bustling Soviet fishing port on the Aral Sea. The animals were placed in Kazakhstan's Red Book of Endangered Species after water from the Syr-Darya and Amu-Darya rivers was diverted for cotton farming, causing the Aral Sea and the life it supported to deteriorate. Steadily shrinking since the 1960's, by 2007, the Aral Sea had declined to 10 percent of its original size. Even the museum's taxidermied evidence of the once-vibrant natural life is slowly disintegrating.

Leo Maguire, The Sunday Times Magazine
Joe is an alpha male macaque at the Medical Research Council's breeding center in the United Kingdom. Joe, whose sole purpose is his highly productive mating capability, will spend his life in captivity and his offspring will be killed in medical experiments.

Joel Sartore, National Geographic Magazine
The number of dusky seaside sparrows, found mainly on Florida's Merritt Island, declined from some 3,000 pairs to none when the salt marsh they inhabited was sprayed with DDT and taken over for use by NASA. The bird shown here is the very last dusky. It died in 1987 and is buried in a bottle of alcohol at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Paul Hansen, Dagens Nyheter
Felix meets his new little sister, Emma Richardson, on February 26, 2009. He has helped his mother choose her first outfit: cowboy pajamas. Felix, like his older brother Mathias, has a genetic disease that progressively destroys the brain. Mathias is now deaf and paralyzed and cannot speak. While Felix shows no outward signs of the disease yet, one hope for his survival is Emma, whom his parents selected to have the exact right genes. Stem cells taken from the umbilical cord at the time of Emma's birth may save Felix if the disease breaks out.

Tomasz Gudzowaty, Yours Gallery/Agentur Focus
A group of boys living in the slums of Mumbai, India, some of whom work as caddies at a local golf club, have begun playing their own variety of golf. Too poor to afford the equipment, they have molded iron rods to resemble golf clubs and use cheap plastic balls from toy shops for golf balls. The rules, though, remain the same as in the West. In modern India, youth are increasingly exposed to Western lifestyles, which can result in an interesting mix of local traditions and emerging aspirations.

Tomasz Gudzowaty, Yours Gallery/Agentur Focus
Often considered a game of the wealthy, golf is believed to have evolved from a 12th-century pastime of Scottish shepherds, who used crooked sticks to knock stones into rabbit holes. In India, a group of boys from the Mumbai slums some of whom have studied the game as caddies at a local club continue the sport's evolution. They fashion golf clubs from iron rods and use cheap plastic balls for golf balls.

Craig Golding, Freelance for Getty Images
Jack Mathieson, 91, of Nowra, New South Wales, Australia, after competing in the 800-meter freestyle swim at the Sydney 2009 World Masters Games at Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre, in Sydney, Australia, on October 10, 2009. The World Masters Games is an international multi-sport event held every four years; competitors range in age from 25 to 101. The 2009 event marked the seventh time the games were held and included athletes from more than 100 countries competing in 28 sports.

Thomas Lekfeldt, Ekstra Bladet/Moment
Vibe and her father Michael enjoy a playful moment in the bathroom at their home in Hundested, Denmark.

Thomas Lekfeldt, Ekstra Bladet/Moment
Vibe takes a shower, spraying water all over the floor. The tube in her chest has been inserted for injections. In June 2007, the five-year-old Danish girl was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The cancer's location made surgery impossible, so Vibe would undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatments for two years before dying on January 17, 2009. Every year 200,000 children around the world develop cancer, and 40 new cases of pediatric brain cancer are diagnosed in Denmark.

Thomas Lekfeldt, Ekstra Bladet/Moment
Vibe lies in a hospital bed in the living room of her home in Hundested, Denmark, while her parents, Michael and Helle, eat dinner with a friend. In her last days, Vibe lost almost all ability to move or speak. Only occasionally was she able to gesture with her left hand or make a small sound. Michael used to say that he would catch the stars in the sky if Vibe asked him to. Now he tells Vibe's twin sister Laerke that Vibe has become one of those stars.

Robert Beck, Sports Illustrated
Tiger Woods flips clubs in midair with his caddy, Steve Williams, during practice at the 2009 World Golf Championships' Accenture Match Play Championship at The Ritz-Carlton Golf Club, Dove Mountain in Marana, Arizona. It was Woods' first tournament since having reconstructive surgery on his left knee. Tim Clark of South Africa would defeat Woods in the second round. Geoff Ogilvy of Australia was ultimately the winner.