Upon winning the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) Prize in 2007, photojournalist James Nachtwey made a wish: to break a story that he was working on "in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age." Today Nachtwey's TED Prize wish comes true with the unveiling of his stirring black-and-white photographs of people around the world who are affected by extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), a mutated form of TB that is found in 49 countries and responsible for more than 20,000 preventable deaths annually.

"Health authorities know what needs to be done, but politicians and the public at large don't have XDR-TB on their radar," wrote TED curator Chris Anderson in an e-mail sent to TED suporters this afternoon. "That's what James Nachtwey's powerful TED Prize wish is all about." Tonight the photos will be projected in public places in 50 cities worldwide, and the next issue of Time magazine will feature a seven-page feature on XDR-TB. Meanwhile, Radical Media has created the below video slideshow as well as a print campaign around the project's Mammalfish-built website; visit today to spread the word.

There are no small photos, only photos taken of really small things with the help of a microscope. That's the message of Nikon's annual Small World Photomicrography Competition, now in its 34th year and a leading showcase for photomicrographers from an array of scientific disciplines (and anyone with some spare time and access to a microscope). The winners of this year's competition will be announced October 15, but the sharp-eyed Nikon judges have narrowed down the top entries for online People's Choice Award voting through October 10. All 20 of the featured entries are hovering between a rating of two to three on a scale of one through five, so this could be a close one. But we know which one would get Dame Edna's vote; the image above was taken by Dr. Shirley Owens, and while it may look like a trio of SimCity watermelons, it's actually blobs of gladiola pollen under a fluorescent microscope at 2500x magnification.

Two interesting bits from the good folks over at the photojournalism hub, PDN Pulse. First up is their story on Sarah Palin's Newsweek cover, which the site has researched and found that the photo used, showing the VP pick holding a shotgun over her shoulder, was a piece of stock from 2002. Nothing strange there, as magazines use stock photos all the time. It's just an odd phenomenon to have a need for it with someone so high profile (see: guarded from the media). In the post, they also spend some time talking about the other covers Newsweek and Time have run recently, talking to the worn out photographers who landed the assignments to shoot them.

Second up comes a tip from a reader who sent us along to this interview with Getty photographer Brent Stirton, the award winning photojournalist who also landed the assignment to shoot Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's new kids (a subject he's also not supposed to be talking about). Here's that:

Not too long ago, we told you about Si Newhouse's sharp eye for kerning (and horse tack) as revealed in a New York Times profile of the magazine magnate, and while Lacie Argyle's graphic of Newhouse was featured prominently on the front page of the Sunday business section, readers may have missed the fact that it was comprised of 1,551 Condé Nast-published magazine covers. Fear not, UnBeige readers, for Argyle (a.k.a. Jennifer Daniel) has provided us a link to the extreme zoom version of her graphic (once it has downloaded, click to enlarge and find your favorite covers).

"In this particular case we didn't have an opportunity to shoot Si Newhouse, so all I had were a few snapshots of him at parties," Daniel tells us. "By themselves none were strong enough to make the feature art, so that's how this was born." As for tracking down all those cover images, she says that they were pooled from a collection of about 3,000 that she found online. And the collaging? "I used a photo mosaic application that I imagine a lot of people use to make desktop wallpapers or Christmas cards with." Condé Nast needn't look any further for its 2008 holiday card image (just don't forget the festive magnifying glass).

Fresh from its geektastic visual survey of vintage computers, Tucson's Etherton Gallery accentuates the positive with a project that celebrates the negative. The gallery has published a portfolio by photographer and Life magazine editor, John Loengard, who captured eerie yet elegant photos of iconic 19th- and 20th-century negatives. Celebrating the Negative includes a shot of gloved hands gingerly holding Alexander Gardner's 1863 portrait of Abraham Lincoln emulsion side up over a light box and another of the negative of Edward Weston's lushly contorted bell pepper of 1930 (fun fact: the pepper was originally photographed in a tin funnel).

Loengard even managed to recapture Henri Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment with his shot (above) of the negative of the iconic 1932 photo "Behind Saint-Lazare Station" squeezed ever so gently between a thumb and forefinger. "Actually, I asked Henri Cartier-Bresson to let me photograph another negative showing two prostitutes in Mexico City," writes Loengard in the portfolio. "'Oh, no! No! No! Think of their feelings! They might be grandmothers now. No, no! You can't publish that,' he replied with intensity that surprised me. Instead, he let me photograph the negative to his most famous photograph." As for the the negative itself, "For safekeeping, [it] was cut from a strip of 35mm film at the start of World War II. Sprocket holes are missing on one side," notes Loengard. "Possibly the film was manufactured without them—or possibly someone has cut them off. Asked about this, Cartier-Bresson replies, 'I swallowed them.'"

If you can manage to get past American Photo's cringeworthy September/October cover shot (pictured at left)—a self-portrait in which Tyra's favorite "noted fashion photographer" Nigel Barker imagines himself as a shutter release-clutching James Bond flanked by girls in bikinis—the magazine's fashion-themed issue holds some intriguing surprises (so intriguing that we can forgive their confusing of America's Next Top Model with Project Runway in a piece about the rising stars of fashion reality TV).

Writer James Crump pens a profile of Lillian Bassman (pictured at right), a protegee of Harper's Bazaar art director extraordinaire Alexey Brodovitch who began shooting couture in Paris in the early 1950s and is still at work in her darkroom today. But she's not brimming with praise for her mentor:

"He was a monster, really," she admits, recalling a poster she designed for the Museum of Modern Art that Brodovitch took complete credit for. Yet she also insists the two had "complete sympathy for each other's tastes and sensibilities."

Elsewhere in the issue, American Photo selects its fashion images of the year, including Paolo Roversi's thrilling "Bag Lady" portfolio for W's April issue, and gets the inside scoop on how photographic team Markus Klinko and Indrani created a post-apocalyptic world for V magazine: it involved two perfectly aligned frames shot with a Fujifilm GX680 medium-format SLR, an abandoned Palm Springs military base, and a lone male model found at a nearby supermarket.

London may be overflowing with closed-circuit video cameras, but amateurs taking photos (or "happy snaps," as one member of Parliament likes to call them) around town are increasingly viewed with suspicion and outright hostility. Sam Delaney surveys the paranoia in a recent piece in The Telegraph that begins wih a tale of his Pentax SLR eliciting "suspicious glances" at the coffee shop before he's even taken a single photo. Then there are the examples: police prevented one Brit from enjoying and photographing a magical holiday combination of Christmas lights and an EastEnders actress (there to host the festivities). Another was followed into a drugstore for taking photos of "sensitive buildings" while visiting relatives. It's all in the name of heightened security during times of terrorism, except when it's about preventing child pornography.

"The growing concern about paedophiles coupled with concerns about terrorism is a heady cocktail that makes police officers edgy," says Labour MP Austin Mitchell—a keen photographer who was once stopped from taking pictures on a beach on the grounds that there were children present. "I didn't see any children and none were in my pictures," he says.

Really, if writer/director Errol Morris decided that he wanted to get into the news analysis business full-time, we would, without hesitation, set up a bed, an IV feeding tube, and a laptop and would just read his thoughts and discussions until the end of our days. That's how great the guy is. Case in point, after his excellent "examination of photography's power" film Standard Operating Procedure, who better to delve into the recent Iranian photo fakery, which you'll remember we covered here, than Mr. Morris? On his NY Times blog, in an entry entitled "Photography as a Weapon," he gets into a conversation with Hany Farid, a professor who recently published an article about photographic fraud, and they both use this Iranian rocket story as a launching off point to discuss printed fakery in general. Really, whatever you're doing right now, just stop and read it. Things don't get much more perfect than starting your day off with an Errol Morris read.

Don't skip that 12-page Gap ad insert in your chunky fall magazines, for between Mikael Jansson's lush black and white portraits of model Lily Donaldson (sporting a flannel jacket, $148) and actress Catalina Sandino Moreno in a deep v-neck ($44) is one of photographer and blogger Scott Schuman, a.k.a. The Sartorialist, who we bumped into earlier this year at Koi Suwannagate's ethereal fall show. Schuman appears deep in thought in a white Gap oxford ($39.50) jazzed up with a patterned ascot and a pair of aviator sunglasses peeking out from his chest pocket. He gave readers of his blog a behind-the-scenes look at the Gap shoot:

A photographer shooting another photographer is never easy. I kept imagining myself throughout the shoot saying "what lens are you using?", "what settings are you using?", "why are you lighting that way?", "does my face make my neck look fat?". I think when I did finally speak to [Jansson], all I was able to get out was a very Ralph Wiggum-ish "I like to eat paste"—I kinda kept quiet after that.

Have a camera but no weekend plans? Then listen up. The New York chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers is sponsoring Close-Up, a nationwide fine art photo competition open to all ASMP members (hint: join here). But it's not as easy as directing your zoom lens at colleagues. Instead, dust off your Sartre, because this contest is existential, or at least asks you to "consider the question of how we become subjects and how that process might be revealed in photography by drawing from Emmanuel Levinas' book, Existents and Existence." The operative questions: Does photography's fracturing of time, space, and narrative provide some of the basic principles of this particular set of thoughts? Does photography create its own philosophy through its format? We're reasonably sure the answers involve Cindy Sherman and a whole lot of mirrors, but the final calls will be made by judge Nina Trivedi, a London-based performance artist and curator. The winning images will be exhibited in Calumet's gallery space, but hurry up, because the deadline for submissions is August 15.