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When night falls and the suits and ties have all been tucked away, a magical world emerges from the darkness, setting the cities of London, Berlin, Paris, New York, Las Vegas, LA, and San Francisco ablaze as the rest of the world sleeps. This is the realm of the night performer, the drag queen or king, the burlesque dancer, the fetish artist, and now of LA-based photographer Samantha Fielding, who has devoted three years of her life to telling the stories of the world’s most gifted and ingenious underground personalities.

Base camp in the mountains © David Prince / Offset

Horse wrangler packing maize kernels © David Prince / Offset

Frozen branches with catkin © David Prince / Offset

When New York City-based photographer David Prince embarked on his journey to Bhutan, he left with no fixed ideas about what he would find, preferring instead to immerse himself totally within the lifestyles of the country’s traditional yak farmers, Buddhist monasteries, and the vast Himalayan mountains that enveloped them all.

Donna adjusts her wig before her number.

Olivia attaches her false eyelash.

For Beautiful by Night, San Francisco-based photographer and filmmaker James Hosking chronicles life in Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, the one and only gay bar left standing in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood that decades ago, was renowned for its thriving LGBT community. In tracing the nightly routines of three of its older drag queens— Donna Personna, Collette LeGrande, and Olivia Hart, Hosking traces the rich history and uncertain future of drag in the crime-ridden area.

© Food Collection / Offset

To see more of Food Collection’s work, please visit Offset.

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As soon as you see Page, you know there is something special about her. She has the ethereal elegance of Grace Kelly, married with the glittery, gender-bending, art-punk edge of downtown New York in the ‘80s and ‘90s. This was something legendary drag queen Linda Simpson noticed about the transgender performer and documented, along with the rest of the era’s drag scene, with a simple 35 mm point-and-shoot camera. In color, of course. Because if anything was ever colorful, it was drag.

Last summer, I had the privilege of being a mentor along with Liz Helman, a photographer and picture editor, on the Young Photographers’ Association program. The brief was for the mentees to explore what “home” meant to them. London-based Charley Murrell was one of our group.

Sara Hopkins is an Atlanta-based documentary and fine art photographer. About this series, Costuming the Archetypes, she writes:

I began this work as part of an exploration of myself. Part of humanity is exploring the unknown, the differences, and the similarities of any aspect of life. For me, masculinity and femininity are faux expression of the archetypes Man and Woman. I felt so strongly about this, that I wanted to incorporate the viewpoint into a very simple, but compelling work. I sought out Camp Drag performers because not only do they express the appearance of masculinity and femininity of the Archetypes, but they also question gender bending and what it means to be a man or woman through exaggeration and humor.

Romanian born photographer Alin Dragulin completed a B.A. in Painting from Portland State University. These days, he spends his time between Portland and Los Angeles, specializing in creating images that convey his unique sense of visual humor. This set of photos belongs to an ongoing series documenting the changes that occur when boys enter their teens. These portraits were taken in February 2008, when they were all aged eleven. The next series will be shot in February 2010, when they will be thirteen years old.

A group of pigs being held in a pre-slaughter area in a slaughterhouse in Atizapan, Mexico. The law requires that the pigs are taken to the stunning box where an electric shock should be applied. However, in this slaughterhouse, as in others, the pigs are driven to the slaughter area directly without prior stunning and are killed fully conscious.

At the slaughterhouse in Arriaga, Mexico, this horse arrived with a mobility problem that prevented him from accessing the stunning box by himself. He was dragged by a chain attached to his neck and died of asphyxia after being suspended several minutes. This is a practice prohibited by law.

“The meat industry knows the damage that can be caused by images of abused animals,” the photojournalist Aitor Garmendia tells me. “In order that these images never see the light, they have guidelines to prevent cameras from accessing their facilities.” In fact, his work on slaughterhouses, part of a larger project on animal exploitation titled Tras los Muros (Behind the Walls), is the most extensive undercover record of its kind. Starting in 2015, Garmendia traveled to eleven states throughout Mexico to document the transportation and killing of farm animals. “I visited about two hundred slaughterhouses,” he reports. “I entered fifty-eight.”