A long time ago in New York City, Steve Addis stood on a corner holding his 1-year-old daughter in his arms; his wife snapped a photo. The image has inspired an annual father-daughter ritual, where Addis and his daughter pose for the same picture, on the same corner, each year. Addis shares 15 treasured photographs from the series, and explores ...

Kelli Jean Drinkwater is a multi-disciplinary artist and activist recognized for her creative practice and voice in radical body politics.

Why can't you make it through the checkout line without flipping through page after page of pregnant celebs in Us magazine? Alison Jackson knows why. And she photographs the people you think you recognize doing what you really want to see.

Frans Lanting is one of the greatest nature photographers of our time. His work has been featured in National Geographic, Audubon andTime, as well as numerous award-winning books. Lanting's recent exhibition, The LIFE Project, offers a lyrical interpretation of the history of life on Earth.

Taryn Simon captures the essence of vast, generation-spanning stories by photographing the descendants of people at the center of the narrative. In this riveting talk she shows a stream of these stories from all over the world, investigating the nature of genealogy and the way our lives are shaped by the interplay of many different forces.

How do we grasp the individual humanity of millions of displaced people? Artist, author and photographer Brian Sokol has been trying to do this from behind a lens, documenting refugee camps and engaging with people who live in them. He shares how disrupting incomplete narratives and letting refugees tell their own stories changed his own preconc...

In the center of Caracas, Venezuela, stands the 45-story "Tower of David," an unfinished, abandoned skyscraper. But about eight years ago, people started moving in. Photographer Iwan Baan shows how people build homes in unlikely places, touring us through the family apartments of Torre David, a city on the water in Nigeria, and an underground vi...

To help him come to terms with the tragedy of his own homeland, Bosnian photographer Ziyah Gafić turns his camera on the aftermath of conflict, showing his images in galleries, in books and on Instagram.

After the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Becci Manson and her volunteer colleagues cleaned and restored hundreds of damaged photos.

Beijing-based artist Liu Bolin silently comments on modern sociopolitical conditions by disappearing into his art.

Computer scientist Michael Rubinstein and his team have developed a "motion microscope" that can show video footage of barely perceivable movements, like breaths and heartbeats.

Laura Boushnak is a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian photographer whose work focuses on women, literacy and education reform in the Arab world.

Danielle Feinberg, Pixar's director of photography, creates stories with soul and wonder using math, science and code. Go behind the scenes of Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Brave, WALL-E and more, and discover how Pixar interweaves art and science to create fantastic worlds where the things you imagine can become real. This talk comes from the PBS sp...

We've heard that bees are disappearing. But what is making bee colonies so vulnerable? Photographer Anand Varma raised bees in his backyard — in front of a camera — to get an up close view. This project, for National Geographic, gives a lyrical glimpse into a beehive, and reveals one of the biggest threats to its health, a mite that preys on bab...

"It took only one picture -- the picture of that little boy on the beach -- to move us to be human," says Tima Kurdi, whose nephew Alan Kurdi's death in 2015 made global headlines and drew attention to the plight of refugees. In this moving talk, Kurdi argues that it shouldn't take extreme tragedies to jar the world out of its complacency regard...

Photographer Rick Guidotti sees a rich beauty in our genetic diversity and works to expose that vision to everyone.

Nathan Myhrvold is a professional jack-of-all-trades. After leaving Microsoft in 1999, he's been a world barbecue champion, a wildlife photographer, a chef, a contributor to SETI, and a volcano explorer.

Kristen Ashburn's photographs bring us face-to-face with real people in desperate circumstances. Taking us to the intimate spaces of her subjects -- the victims of war, disaster, epidemic -- she elicits the sublime sadness and resolve of human beings in suffering.

With a large-format camera and a knack for talking her way into forbidden zones, Taryn Simon photographs portions of the American infrastructure inaccessible to its inhabitants.

Creativity and innovation are flowing in South America, while countries across the continent still face unique challenges. As we plan for TEDGlobal 2014—happening in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in October—this playlist will get you in the spirit.

Thomas Peschak strives to merge photojournalism and cutting edge science to create powerful media projects that tackle critical marine conservation issues.

A National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Wade Davis has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.”

Time can pass in the blink of an eye. These talks underscore the importance of not just stopping to smell the roses, but also taking a photo or two while you're at it.

Through his mesmerizing satellite photographs, Benjamin Grant offers us a new way of seeing of our planet and ourselves.

Photographer Boniface Mwangi wanted to protest against corruption in his home country of Kenya. So he made a plan: He and some friends would stand up and heckle during a public mass meeting. But when the moment came ... he stood alone. What happened next, he says, showed him who he truly was. As he says, "There are two most powerful days in your...

With photography, Yann Arthus-Bertrand has captured the beauty of the Earth. Through video and film, his latest projects bind together ecology and humanism. For him, it's all about living together.

When a very young child looks at a picture, she can identify simple elements: "cat," "book," "chair." Now, computers are getting smart enough to do that too. What's next? In a thrilling talk, computer vision expert Fei-Fei Li describes the state of the art -- including the database of 15 million photos her team built to "teach" a computer to un...

Ziyah Gafić photographs everyday objects—watches, shoes, glasses. But these images are deceptively simple; the items in them have been exhumed from the mass graves of the Bosnian War. Gafić, a TED Fellow and Sarajevo native, is photographing every item from these graves in order to create a living archive of the identities of those lost. 

For centuries, people have viewed swamps and wetlands as obstacles to avoid. But for photographer Mac Stone, who documents the stories of wildlife in Florida's Everglades, the swamp isn't a hindrance — it's a national treasure. Through his stunning photographs, Stone shines a new light on a neglected, ancient and important wilderness. His messag...

Stacey Baker has always been obsessed with how couples meet. When she asked photographer Alec Soth to help her explore this topic, they found themselves at the world's largest speed-dating event, held in Las Vegas on Valentine's Day, and at the largest retirement community in Nevada — with Soth taking portraits of pairs in each locale. Between t...