Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

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  • Business men take a break at an upscale coffee bar. Coffee shops are on every block in downtown Santiago where men catch a cup of coffee and maybe a kiss. The waitress wearing a short red dress works for substantial tips at Cafe Cousino or Coffee with Legs. She can make $800 a week by flirting, lighting cigarettes and serving coffee.
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  • Business men take a smoke and coffee break at an upscale coffee bar. Coffee shops are on every block in downtown Santiago where men catch a cup of coffee and maybe a kiss. Dressed in a short, red dress, the waitress works for substantial tips at Cafe Cousino or Coffee with Legs. She can make $800 a week by flirting, lighting cigarettes and serving coffee.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_1187026.jpg
  • Men sitting outside a shop on a street known for wedding attire. Migrant workers in China are mostly people from impoverished regions who move to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. According to Chinese government statistics, the current number of migrant workers in China is estimated at 120 million (approximately 9% of the population). China is now experiencing the largest mass migration of people from the countryside to the city in history. An estimated 230 million Chinese (2010), roughly equivalent to two-thirds the population of the U.S., have left the countryside and migrated to the cities in recent years. About 13 million more join them every year—an expected 250 million by 2012, and 300 to perhaps 400 million by 2025. Many are farmers and farm workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories.
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  • Three men contemplate the best way to cross a flooded dirt road.
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  • A Western writer talking with a group of refugee Sudanese men.
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  • Men and women of the Kara tribe gather for an evening dance.
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  • Men and women of the Kara tribe gather for an evening dance.
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  • Men and women of the Kara tribe gather for an evening dance.
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  • Men and women of the Kara tribe gather for an evening dance.
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  • Men from Suri clans compete in bloody ceremonial pole fights.
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  • Men from Suri clans compete in bloody ceremonial pole fights.
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  • Men from Suri clans compete in bloody ceremonial pole fights.
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  • Men and women of the Kara tribe gather for an evening dance.
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  • Men from Suri clans compete in bloody ceremonial pole fights as women wait at their huts.
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  • Men in costume celebrating Schleicherlaufen.
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  • Men in suits of tree lichen celebrating Schleicherlaufen.
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  • Men in costume celebrating Schleicherlaufen.
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  • Men from a food internet ordering company deliver in re-used glass jars as an attempt to reduce one-use-plastic.
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  • El Molo men, deformed from consuming the waters of Lake Turkana.
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  • Kara men prepare for an evening dance celebration.
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  • Men, women and children of the Kara tribe gather for an evening dance.
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  • A fishing brigade on the Bolshaya River south of the town of Oktyabrski where men make a fish camp out of a beached, ocean-going vessel.  They are not fishing on this day because it allows time for the fish to spawn, and indigenous communities up river in Kamchatka can fish in the area along the Bolshaya River. <br />
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Fishing brigades use tractors to tow one end of a net and then bring it around full circle in the river to capture the fish. A net is  dumped into small boats that have small nets laid in them. A crane picks up the small nets and dumps them into trucks that take the fish to the processing plants in Ust Bolsheretsk. If fishing was allowed every day in the mouths of these rivers just off the Kamchatka shelf, no salmon would get up river to spawn. There are two “passing days” each week when fishing is banned, so these fishermen hang out in their camp and do their laundry. Some fishermen come from as far as Ulan-Ude, which is on the border with Siberia. One of the fishermen in this photo is from PK, two are from Urilutsk, Siberia, and two are from Oktybrski.
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  • Men bring their camels to a saint's tomb to have their camels healed.
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  • Ghanaian men building a volunteer health clinic.
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  • Men and a boy fishing on Thorne Bay.
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  • Men in costume celebrating Schleicherlaufen.
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  • Men in costume celebrating Schleicherlaufen.
    MELISSA FARLOW_RF4115_1114478.jpg
  • Men in suits of tree lichen celebrating Schleicherlaufen.
    MELISSA FARLOW_RF4115_1114476.jpg
  • Men fuel an airplane.
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  • Waving whips, clubs, and traditional stools, Daasanach men dance their way into a crowd of potential wives at a pairing off ceremony in Ileret.
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  • Men walk on the drought covered land of Kenya's Lake Turkana region.
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  • Waving whips, clubs, and traditional stools, Daasanach men dance their way into a crowd of potential wives at a pairing off ceremony in Ileret.
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  • Men gather in the shade of a tent to socialize at a camel competition.
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  • Men gather in the shade of a tent to socialize at a camel competition.
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  • Men gather in the shade of a tent to socialize at a camel competition.
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  • Men gather in the shade of a tent to socialize at a camel competition.
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  • Kara men prepare for a coming of age ceremony
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  • Men and women of the Kara tribe gather for an evening dance.
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  • Men and women of the Kara tribe dance at a bull jumping initiation.
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  • Men and women of the Kara tribe dance at a bull jumping initiation.
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  • Kara men, women and children participate in an evening dance.
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  • Kara men, women and children participate in an evening dance.
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  • Suri men share a laugh in a village outside of Tulgit.
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  • Men from Suri clans compete in bloody ceremonial pole fights.
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  • Men from Suri clans compete in bloody ceremonial pole fights.
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  • Men from Suri clans compete in bloody ceremonial pole fights.
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  • Men from Suri clans compete in bloody ceremonial pole fights.
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  • Men and women of the Kara tribe gather for an evening dance.
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  • Men from Suri clans compete in bloody ceremonial pole fights.
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  • Men watch a dancer at a bar.
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  • Clearing room for a garden, Mbuti men hack through tropical hardwood. A logging company hires Pygmies to cut down their own forest which they depend on for their livelihood.
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  • Men on motorcycles ride on walls while transvestites perform below.
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  • Silhouetted men fish in the Firehole River surrounded by geothermal activity.
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  • Ghanaian men building a volunteer health clinic.
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  • Overcome by religious frenzy, men help a woman lying on the ground.
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  • Bugu has a dispute over a woman and challenges his rival to a Donga (stick fight)  Men from Suri clans compete in bloody ceremonial pole fights and will do it for tourist groups. You have to be careful so you aren't responsible for injury by being a tourist in this area.
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  • Rachel broke up with her ex-pat boyfriend and is well-versed in the social scene of Shanghai. She prefers ex-pats but doesn’t like the dynamic that many of them think that women like her prefer them and use this to their advantage. Even though the statistics show that there are many more western men marrying Chinese women, those statistics are not discussed in the Chinese media. For example, the government would never allow a soap opera about all the western men connecting with Chinese women, so they promoted a soap opera about the opposite situation called “Foreign Babes in Beijing” featuring western women falling for Chinese men.
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  • Pygmies chop down the forest they need for their own survival. As Bantus move into this area and search for gold or other resources, these cancerous settlements in the forest grow and grow and eventually the Pygmies don't have the healthy forest they need to survive.
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  • The Bale ceremony is precursor to the Guol ceremony which is a young woman's path to womanhood. The male asks the female to partner and previously she did not have the right to refuse. But there have been changes and the parents will now pay attention to their daughter's wishes.
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  • This Indian festival in the Ramblas Catalunya area of Barcelona is called Vaisakhi.  These are Sikhs from Punjab that started a procession in Ramblas Raval and carried it thru Ramblas Catalunya and ended at the Plaza St. Augustine. The festival includes the passing out of huge amounts of food.  The men in this street hauled cart after shopping cart of fresh fruit and passed it out to the public.
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  • Fish inspectors in surplus tanks get stuck in pursuit of poachers.<br />
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 An anti-poaching enforcement trip starts in Sobolevo, the salmon poaching epicenter. Men ride on tanks and in boats attempting to spot poachers who put out nets to fish–they can see where sediment on the rocks was washed away and a net was dragged. Their suspicions are confirmed when they find spilled caviar. They follow many paths into the woods finding the poacher camp. <br />
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The patrols are just outside Soboleva in the heart of the most poached area of Kamchatka. Soboleva is on the Sea of Okhotsk, just off the Kamchatka shelf and is only accessible by MI-8 helicopter.
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  • This is an over the top spa, massage parlor, and hotel in the Suzhou Creek area of Shanghai. Guys walk from the men’s locker room through an aquarium tunnel filled with endangered species to the bath area. From there they can turn left and play ping pong or watch a movie with their family in their bathrobes, or they can turn right and meet their mistresses in a discreet room.
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  • Marriage is different in China, from mass weddings like this, to the “bare branches” phenomenon where there are not enough women for all the men to marry. Couples aspire to the ideal of the billboard above them—the one-child family. But will their son be able to find a girl? According to the 2010 census, there were 118.06 boys born for every 100 girls, which is 0.53 points lower than the ratio obtained from a population sample survey carried out in 2005. However, the gender ratio of 118.06 is still beyond the normal range of around 105 percent, and experts warn of increased social instability should this trend continue. For the population born between 1900 and 2000, it is estimated that there could be 35.59 million fewer females than males. So maybe everyone eventually has a car, but can every boy have a girl? It is important for China’s leaders to placate the Comfort Class. From issues of grave consequence to trivialities, the government has made clear that it will do whatever it takes to keep the swelling middle class happy. In Beijing, for example, newly prosperous residents are snapping up automobiles at a rate of 1,000 a day. The number of vehicles on the capital’s sclerotic roads has doubled in the past five years, to 3 million, or about a million more vehicles than in all of New York City.
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  • A timber faller works alone in the woods at Winter Harbor on Prince of Wales Island. He turns off his chain saw occasionally to listen for others working on nearby hillsides. It is a way the men look out for each other's safety.<br />
Loggers and fishermen rank in the top two spots for most dangerous jobs. Both are common lines of work for people in the Alaskan outdoors. Since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking fatal occupational injuries in 1980, there were 4,547 fatal work injuries in 2010, and fatality rates of some occupations remain alarmingly high.
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  • Men who live in Sylvester wait for court testimony to begin in Madison. Their community of 150 residents sued the coal company that assaulted them with black dust blanketing their town from a nearby coal stockpile and preparation plant. They won the law suit but little changed besides the company bought a street sweeper for the town.
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  • Fish inspectors take a break during their pursuit of salmon poachers.<br />
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A warden shares tea with the poachers in their kitchen tent. There are a lot of unwritten rules. Fish wardens know that it costs $10,000 to get into a poaching camp in Kamchatka, and $10,000 to get back out by helicopter with your catch. The wardens understand that if they destroy fishing gear and caviar production facilities, they have harmed their neighbors enough. And they also can’t afford $10,000 to get criminals back by helicopter for prosecution.<br />
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The poachers know this, and know not to bring any kind of identity papers with them because it is possible for them to be prosecuted with their passports.  The kitchen survives the burn so men can feed themselves. The poachers go free, but have to sit and wait for their helicopter, empty handed which is why the wardens don’t burn their kitchen or sleeping areas.
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  • A Rapa Nui man with his girlfriend watch tourists explore the moai on Easter Island. As the numbers grow for tourism, they outnumber locals who like their quiet island life.
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  • Tourists photograph a Rapa Nui native dancer in body paint. Approximately 6,000 Rapa Nui live on Easter Island, which belongs to Chile. They numbered only 111 in 1877 after slave traders and disease decimated the population. <br />
Most people associate Easter Island with the famous, ancient statues known as moai and are unaware that descendants of the Polynesian culture inhabit the island today.
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  • Crew members from a family fishing operation land approximately 1,000 Coho salmon in the boat from a purse seine in waters near Craig, Alaska.<br />
Alaska’s fisheries are some of the richest in the world, with fishermen harvesting hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of salmon, crab, herring, halibut, pollock, and groundfish every year. However, overfishing, exploitation, and poor fisheries management in the ‘40s and ‘50s took a heavy toll on the industry. The state adopted drastic measures that saved the fishing industry from collapse. Tough times again hit the fishermen in the 1970s as the number of boats grew and increasingly efficient gear depleted catch levels to record lows.<br />
Permit systems and reserves helped the commercial industry recover in the late ‘70s—a trend that has continued to the present because of cooperation between scientists and fishermen.<br />
Fishermen and loggers rank in the top two spots for most dangerous jobs. Both are common lines of work for people in the Alaskan outdoors. Since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking fatal occupational injuries in 1980, there were 4,547 fatal work injuries in 2010, and fatality rates of some occupations remain alarmingly high.
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  • Tourists walk through the ruins of Monte Alban, a Zapotec capital in the Valley of Oaxaca. Inhabited over a period of 1,500 years by a succession of peoples – Olmecs, Zapotecs and Mixtecs – the terraces, dams, canals, pyramids and artificial mounds of Monte Albán were literally carved out of the mountain and are the symbols of a sacred topography. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with unique architecture.
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  • Vigo has the largest biomass fish shipping port in the world.<br />
A worker carries a shark on a hook through the facility.
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  • Photographer Randy Olson dives off the coast of Komodo Island.
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  • Icelandic fishermen use the open air to dry cod heads on racks, and the protein is sent to Nigeria.<br />
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The Icelandic "hardfiskur" or dried fish has been very popular with Icelanders throughout the centuries. Providing Icelanders with a healthy snack that's full of protein and nutrients. The Icelandic fishing grounds are among the purest in the world.
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  • A fish tangled in a net on board a fishing vessel off of the Vetmannaeyjar Islands, an archipelago of 15 islands and 30 rock stacks off the South Coast of Iceland.
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  • Fishing off of the Vetmannaeyjar Islands, an archipelago of 15 islands and 30 rock stacks off the South Coast of Iceland.
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  • Sengalese fishermen entering and exiting the port at Dakar in small, colorful pirogues. <br />
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Foreign trawlers and an expanding fishmeal industry are increasingly threatening the livelihood of Senegalese fishermen, forcing many to migrate to Europe.
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  • A diver surfaces off the coast of Komodo Island in Indonesia.
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  • Workers transport laundry baskets full of jellyfish at a Zhapo, China fishery. They fish on cloudy days when they can see masses of jelly from their boats.  A cultural difference; the Chinese like to eat jellyfish because of the texture.<br />
Although low on the food chain, jellyfish thrive and are an important substitute food source as the other species decline.<br />
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Salted and dried jellyfish, however, have long been considered a delicacy by the Chinese. Fish ecologists say where stocks of large fish collapse, jellyfish proliferate, impeding recovery of stocks by feeding on larvae and eggs. They also compete for food such as zooplankton.
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  • Workers unload and weigh fish on the dock of a cannery. Petersburg port has the largest home-based halibut fleet in Southeast Alaska.
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  • The Logger of the Year winner hugs his girlfriend in red boots to celebrate after he won in the annual logging show held in Thorne Bay on Prince of Wales Island. The Southeast Alaskan competition is the “real thing”—not a tourist show—where loggers, former loggers, and “wannabe” loggers compete, climbing trees and sawing timber.
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  • Scientists climb on gigantic stumps of trees cut years ago while they hiking through surveying what is left of the old growth forest. Tongass National Forest encompasses 16.8 million acres and is the largest temperate rain forest on the planet. The 600 to 800 year old trees lin these forests forests contribute irreplaceable biological diversity.
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  • Cowboys from central Utah wait for a signal to begin branding young calves and an errant dog finds his way back to safety. Separated when they were moving cattle, the dog jumped up into the saddle upon seeing his owner. The ranch is surrounded by federal land of the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Canyonlands National Park with spectacular views or the orange walls surrounding Indian Creek.
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  • Mescal factory workers taking a lunch break.
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  • Restaurant patrons are inspired to join mariachi bands in song at a restaurant  in Garibaldi Plaza. Since the 1920s, traditional musicians have dressed in their finest matching suits and brought their guitars to serenade locals and tourists with heartfelt ballads and earn a few pesos.
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  • Couples weather fog while lounging on a rocky beach in Miraflores, an affluent neighborhood in Lima. Some read newspapers and others sleep while a food vender carries treats looking for sales on a Sunday morning.
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  • Residents of a remote village  in Kamchatka rush to meet the supply helicopter. Original inhabitants Khailino are indigenous. Dogs run wild in the street and locals on board a motorcycle race to try to get a woman on board to be taken where she can get medical attention. <br />
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In Northern Kamchatka, indigenous Koryak people and Russians came for “Northern money” when the Soviet Union wanted to tame the area. Income paid was eight times more than a similar job in Moscow, so some people figured out how to get all the necessary permits to work. When default happened, no one in the remote outposts received salaries.  People made a living from salmon caviar and created fishing brigades with distribution systems. Living in a very small community of 700 residents, and the temperatures drop to –40° in the winter, everyone works hard to merely survive and are kind to each other.
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  • A personal trainer helps a client at the Ozone Fitness Club.
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  • Traffic sweeps past an American chain restaurant on East Nanjing Road.
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  • Workers dismantle a protective fence around the Olympic Stadium area.
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  • There are 2.6 billion armpits in China, according to an ad man, and someone has to sell them deodorant. This shop-owner (right) thinks a guy wandering Nanjing Road in a full knight suit will do the trick for his snack shop.
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  • Pedestrians walk past a movie theater.
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  • A construction site near Raffles City.
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  • Shoppers outside a Sam's club store in Shenzhen.
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  • Adjusting the uniforms of guards at the Palais de Fortune development.
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  • Workers in the Palais de Fortune development outside Beijing.
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  • A close view of beads of sweat on an Australian man's head.
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  • An Aborigine and white man lighting up cigarettes together.
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  • An Australian Aborigine man applying body paint to his chest.
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  • An Australian Aborigine man preparing body paint.
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  • A cattleman and his herd in a muddy pen preparing for coming rains.
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