Corrine Dufka first picked up a camera during her stint as a social worker in El Salvador in the mid-eighties. From 1988-1999, she photographed extensively in Central America, Bosnia and Africa—most notably the genocide in Rwanda. Her book, This is War: Photographs From A Decade of Conflict, chronicles not just the conflict she covered, but also the toll it took on her. “But as the years passed, I became aware that, with each war, what I gained in stature as a photojournalist, I lost in human empathy,” Dufka writes in the book.

Born in Tehran in 1952, Hengameh Golestan began photographing in 1972, at a time when there were just a handful of women photographers in the country. In March 1979, just a day after the hijab law was enforced in Iran, Golestan took to the streets with 20 rolls of film and documented the mass protest against an oppressive regime that had most affected Iran’s women. One of her iconic images shows impassioned women defiantly braving the snow, protesting – without the hijab.

Ernest Cole was born in 1940, in a Black freehold township in Pretoria, South Africa. At 16, he decided to take up photography in the middle of a raging apartheid in the country. While Peter Magubane was shooting protests and on-the-spot violence, Cole was more focused on photographing people living on the margins of a society that was now more divisive than ever. He’s known to have gotten access to prisons by getting arrested himself. There’s an iconic image of his, of a line of black men outside doctors’ offices undergoing a medical examination in the nude, in South Africa. By 1966, it was getting hard for Cole to work in South Africa, and his seminal book House of Bondage was published in New York in 1967. It was an unapologetic, accusatory look at the atrocities of the apartheid. In 1990, Cole died in New York, after having sadly faded from the scene in the 1970s itself.