It is a thankless and often dangerous job in many fractured societies around the world: tracking the victims of violence that is occasionally sponsored by the state.

It falls to the photographers to bear witness, to document. At the same time they rankle authorities because they are truth-tellers, showing an unflattering side of a nation.

In the following essay, I’m focusing on what a group of photographers in the Philippines have been doing since the election of a tough, authoritarian-style leader in 2016. These photographers, fighting grief and withstanding pressure, are the subjects of a searing new National Geographic documentary, The Nightcrawlers.

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“When I drive around the streets of Manila, I don’t remember by place, landmarks. I remember crime scenes,” says photojournalist Raffy Lerma in the opening minutes of the documentary The Nightcrawlers. This evening, he arrives at a wake for a 15-year-old boy, shot twice in the head and once in the neck the night before. The boy’s father and uncle stand grieving over the open casket as neighbors mill around. “Every day you cover these scenes. It chips away at your humanity. But it’s more important to cover these killings than to do nothing at all.”

Lerma is one of a small group of journalists, known by some as the Nightcrawlers of Manila, committed to documenting the drug war in the Philippines. Night after night, they rush to document the crime scenes before the authorities arrive to clean up the site. “In photojournalism I believe that you have a purpose … of documenting history unfolding before your eyes,” Lerma says. … Read Whitney Johnson’s full essay here.

Photobook of the Year: Sohrab Sura’s The Coast took the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation award, with judges citing its dark, vibrant look at the undercurrent of violence along the Indian coastline. “Almost like a novel or a thriller in its format, cover, and design, it’s a photobook that works on the same level as a challenging work of fiction,” said publisher and juror Nina Strand.

London Calling. Pennie Smith captured the anger of The Clash in her images of the English punk legends. Her black-and-white, guitar-smashing photo was chosen as the cover of the group’s classic “London Calling” album. Now Smith’s work with The Clash is a centerpiece of an exhibit opening today at the Museum of London, The Guardian reports.

World’s best: They were chosen from 78,801 photographs submitted from 129 countries. And now the World Press Photo Exhibition 2019 is on tour in the United States, through December 8 in Washington, D.C., and then in Phoenix. Here are the winning images.

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