Photography

Jane Bown: eye to eye with the artists

Memories of the late photographer who, over a 60-year career at the Observer, indelibly captured cultural icons from Hockney to Bacon

The big picture: Sitaram Raul’s bats in flight

The Indian photographer luminously captures the uncanny essence of nature

Facing the truth about apartheid

Can we ever combine justice with forgiveness?

The big picture: Bryan Sansivero’s abandoned dollhouses

Dollhouses and toy cars fill a room in one of 15m abandoned US homes

The grid: Jane Hilton’s modern-day cowboys

The British photographer’s portraits of ranch hands at home offer an intimate look at ‘the new Americana’

Sarah Larby makes art from tools

The photographer seeks to record the often hidden labour and materials that go into painting

The big picture: myths and misfits in Málaga

Lúa Ribeira fuses modernity and classical references in compelling portraits of marginal groups living in her native Spain

The big picture: the mothers of Beirut’s disappeared

Armed and desperate, the relatives of kidnap victims demanding to be heard in civil-war ravaged Lebanon

The grid: Amy Friend casts vintage photos in a new light

The Canadian artist takes ‘orphaned’ photographs from the 1920s-40s and makes them sparkle again

The big picture: Helen Levitt’s New York cool

This image by the ‘supreme poet-photographer’ captures a 70s street scene imbued with rough-edged authenticity and easy elegance

The grid: a bird on the brink

Jon Ching’s fantastical paintings of Hawaiian honeycreepers celebrate the last of a dying breed

The rise of the Scot tub: why saunas are hot property in Scotland

Saunas at Scotland’s scenic spots are becoming the country’s hottest property and giving wild swimmers respite from the frigid North Sea

The face of race relations in 1950s America

A ‘man of substance’ emerges in a Gordon Parks image inspired by Ralph Ellison’s debut novel

The grid: weird and whimsical buildings

From houses built into cliffs to a fish-shaped office – the world’s strangest structures

Cloned dogs Ken and Henry

Lounging on a vet’s table in Louisiana, the dogs whose resemblence to each other is too close for comfort

The big picture: Adrienne Salinger’s teenage bedrooms

Thirty years ago, the US photographer let us peek inside the inner sanctums of 200 teenagers

The roots of Blondie

Martyn Goddard’s photographs capture the New York new wave band on the cusp of fame in 1978

Sally Mann: my quest to take the perfect photograph

In an extract from her new memoir, the celebrated photographer learns the hard way when to push through – and when to give up