Few countries in history have experienced as sudden a transformation as Saudi Arabia. Until the founding of the modern state by the Saud family in the early 20th century, the vast Arabian Peninsula was inhabited mainly by nomadic groups living a traditional lifestyle that hadn’t changed much in thousands of years. The discovery and exploitation of oil brought an unprecedented influx of wealth that, almost overnight, catapulted the country into the top echelon of the world’s economies. That affluence, combined with traditional values, has led to some of the country’s most compelling apparent paradoxes.

“Development happened so fast that they haven’t really had a chance to keep up with it the way other societies have,” says Peter Bogaczewicz a Canadian architect and photographer who has lived in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh for the past five years. Examples of the country’s mixture of tradition and modernity are everywhere in Bogaczewicz’s new book, including its title: Kingdom of Sand and Cement. Bogaczewicz has spent the past half-decade traveling the country, initially out of a desire to document historic sites threatened by the rapid pace of development. During that time, he photographed abandoned villages disappearing back into the desert as well as 10,000-year-old petroglyphs.

“The petroglyphs are just these rocks at the side of the road,” he says. “You can drive off the highway and a couple hundred meters away you’re faced with this amazing scene. Anywhere else you’d have a museum built around it. Here, there were just a few people scratching their names into the side.” As part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s effort to promote Saudi Arabian tourism, the country is now working to preserve some historic sites. But countless others—including some documented in Bogaczewicz’s book—have already been destroyed in the country’s rush to modernize.

In other ways, though, Saudis manage to hold onto their cultural past. On weekends, many young men drive their cars out to the desert to go off-roading, slaloming down the sides of sand dunes as spectators watch. Another of Bogaczewicz’s photographs captures a Saudi family having a picnic under a highway overpass, much as their bedouin ancestors might have stopped their caravansary by a desert wadi to have a meal. And, of course, Islam remains central to Saudi identity. Bogaczewicz even got the opportunity to photograph Mecca’s Great Mosque. “It was a little nerve-racking at the time, but I realized it was probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he says.

At sunset in winter in Spain, thousands of starlings gather in enormous flocks, named murmurations for the low fluttering thunder of their wings. The birds move in astounding unison, each mimicking its six or seven of their nearest neighbors as they whirl across the sky.

It’s breathtaking, sure. But add a hungry hawk or falcon, and your jaw will drop. When the raptor swoops in to attack, its prey bolts in the opposite direction, triggering what scientists call “waves of agitation” that pulse through the flock at speeds surpassing 50 miles per hour.

“The falcon is shaping this great living sculpture that is the starling cloud,” says Xavi Bou, a Catalonian photographer whose dazzling series Ornitographies visualizes the patterns birds make through the air. His images condense several seconds of movement into a single frame to better capture their flight—and fight.

“It’s maybe the most complex movement that I could show in bird flights,” he adds.

Bou’s unique focus (previously covered by WIRED) sets him apart from other bird photographers, who are often more interested in their subject’s plumage or wingspans. Since he only cares about their trajectory through the air, Bou is free to document urban birds like starlings that look more ordinary—though their aeronautics are anything but.

Spain is home to millions of spotless starlings (Sturnus unicolor), and also hosts common starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) from Central and Northern Europe in the fall. When the birds gather there, they tend to flock in mixed murmurations, likely for safety. “The bigger the flock, the less likely that ‘you’ will be taken,” says ornithologist Ernest Garcia.

The photographer captured his first big flock back in 2011, but it took Bou until last December to find another one as big. The birds were roosting in a marsh in the Ebro Delta, a 79,000-acre wetland a couple hours south of his hometown Barcelona. Each day they fed in nearby fields and returned to sleep in the reeds at night, inevitably drawing the unwanted attention of a falcon looking to hunt.

Bou filmed their elaborate aerial stunts over several evenings, capturing 60 frames per second with a 4K video camera to produce 1 terabyte of imagery. Later, he split the footage into clips, each between five and 20 seconds long and containing 300 to 1,200 frames. He layered those in Photoshop to produce the final images. The result is wonderfully impressionistic, reminding Bou of “energetic strokes produced by charcoal or ink in the air.”

After being in the Ebro Delta a couple months, the starlings departed for a park further north. If they return next year, Bou will be waiting—and likely, so will the falcon.

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Reuben Wu has photographed some of the world’s most remote and extreme places: Chile’s Atacama Desert, the Bisti Badlands of New Mexico, the Arctic tundra of Norway, Peru’s Pastoruri glacier. But few locations compare to the site of his latest project, Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni. Stretching across more than 4,000 square miles of South America’s Altiplano (high plain), Salar de Uyuni (literally, the salts of Uyuni, the nearest town) is the world’s largest salt flat, a nearly featureless white landscape left behind by the evaporation of prehistoric lakes.

During the rainy season, the flats are submerged in 6 to 20 inches of perfectly still water, turning the shallow lake into the world’s largest mirror. In the dry season, when Wu visited, the salt crystals dry into an intricate latticework of tile-like polygons stretching away to the horizon in every direction. “I was really taken by this composition of pure horizon,” Wu says. “It’s just the sky and the landscape.”

Shooting the salt flats was the culmination of a week-long Bolivian road trip Wu and two companions took last July. Between the freezing nighttime temperatures, high altitudes (the Altiplano averages 12,000 feet above sea level), and long drives, the team got little sleep. “We were cold, we were light-headed, and doing anything physical was very hard,” Wu recalls. “There were times when I really struggled.”

But the hardships paid off when the crew finally reached the salt flats. Because it was the dry season, most of the Salar de Uyuni looked like a geometrically patterned moonscape. Still, Wu was lucky enough to find a standing puddle large enough to capture the rainy-season mirror effect, too. In addition to more traditional landscape photography, Wu created several of his signature aeroglyphs—glowing geometric shapes that float mysteriously in the sky. Wu draws the aeroglyphs by piloting LED-equipped drones in precise patterns while keeping his shutter open to create a long exposure.

Over the course of the road trip Wu documented a variety of Bolivian landscapes ranging from sandy deserts to rocky palisades, but the Salar de Uyuni emerged as the highlight. “If it were in the US, it would be swarming with tourists,” he says. “Instead, we had the whole thing to ourselves except for the occasional farmer and a cow.” The salt flats are rich in deposits of lithium, a key element in smartphone and electric car batteries, but lithium mining operations are still in their infancy thanks to the region’s inaccessibility and the reluctance of recently ousted president Evo Morales to greenlight foreign investment.

Throughout the trip, Wu used a Phase One XT, a compact medium-format digital camera that allowed him to take ultrahigh-resolution images on the go. Back in his studio, he used software to tinker with the images until arriving at the final product. Wu thinks of photography as “painting with light” and doesn’t fetishize authenticity. “For me, everything’s a tool,” he says. “The camera’s a tool, the computer’s a tool. Just so long as the technology and the tools don’t overwhelm the vision.”

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Sometime in the next year or two China will likely surpass the United States as the world’s biggest movie market. With a population of 1.4 billion, China already has more movie screens and sells more tickets than any other country. This year, it’s projected to generate $11.05 billion in revenue compared to America’s $12.11 billion. Although the pace has slowed in recent years, China’s box office receipts grew by an average of 35 percent a year over the past decade.This has given the country’s Communist Party leaders extraordinary clout with Hollywood studios eager to get their films into the lucrative but tightly censored Chinese market.

But because of strict limits on foreign film imports, domestic movies still dominate Chinese cinemas; in 2018, 398 Chinese pictures were released in theaters compared to 118 foreign films. Shooting that many films requires a lot of movie studios, so China’s largely state-controlled film industry has been on a building spree for the past couple decades. Hengdian World Studios, built in the 1990s on farmland in China’s southeastern Zhejiang Province, claims to be the world’s largest outdoor film studio and features full-scale replicas of the Forbidden City and Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, along with dozens of palaces, gardens, and streetscapes.

Hengdian is just one of the Chinese mega-studios documented by Washington, DC-based photographer Mark Parascandola for his new book, Once Upon a Time in Shanghai. The project is something of a sequel to Parascandola’s 2012 series Once Upon a Time in Almeria, in which the photographer explored abandoned Spanish movie sets from golden-age Hollywood classics like Cleopatra and Lawrence of Arabia. Such over-the-top historical epics have largely gone out of fashion in America, but they’re still massively popular in China, where studios churn out hundreds of historical films every year. “They’re on a scale far bigger than anything you’d see in Hollywood these days,” Parascandola says.

Chinese movie studios favor historical themes in part out of self-censorship. It’s easier to avoid controversial subjects in a movie set during the Ming Dynasty or during moments of national pride like the resistance to Japanese occupation in the 1930s. “Setting a film in the past is a way to tell a story without involving current political issues,” Parascandola explains. “At the same time, history is itself censored to a degree—you don’t see many films about the Cultural Revolution, for instance.”

Because so many films and television shows are made about the same historical periods, studios are willing to spend the money to build high-quality sets that can be used again and again, as with the full-scale Forbidden City replica at Hengdian World Studios or the hyper-realistic World War II-era Shanghai streets at Shanghai Film Park. “They’re real buildings, not just plywood facades,” Parascandola says. The sets are so impressive that they draw paying tourists, which is how Parascandola gained access to many of them. Some couples even shoot their wedding photos on the sets.

While making the series, Parascandola immersed himself in contemporary Chinese cinema, which he found more interesting than he imagined, despite the censorship. “There’s this fascinating world of Chinese movies out there that we really don’t get to learn much about in the US,” Parascandola says. “There are some really great films being made.”

Reversing the longtime trend of Hollywood sending its hits overseas, top Chinese movies are increasingly being screened in American cinemas and showing up on American streaming services. Earlier this year, the sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth, the second-highest-grossing film in Chinese box office history, got a limited American theatrical release; it’s now available on Netflix. It got mixed reviews from American critics, but its arrival in the States could be sign of things to come. Hey, something’s gotta compete with Star Wars, right?

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Less than two miles from Iceland’s Reykjavik airport sits a nondescript metal building as monolithic and drab as a commercial poultry barn. There’s a deafening racket inside, too, but it doesn’t come from clucking chickens. Instead, tens of thousands of whirring GPUs perform the complex, exhaustive calculations needed to verify cryptocurrency transactions and add them to the public record, otherwise known as the blockchain. Hundreds of thousands of fans blast cold air to keep the machines from overheating, aided by six giant ceiling turbines that spin with the collective force of 360 washing machines.

The facility, called Enigma and established by Genesis Mining in 2014, is easily the loudest environment that British photographer Lisa Barnard has ever documented. She visited two years ago while shooting her project Bitcoin. “The biggest thing I remember was just the noise and the flashing lights and wiring,” Barnard says. “It was like being inside a computer.”

The high-tech barn seems worlds away from the geysers, waterfalls, and lagoons that inspire 2.3 million tourists each year (not to mention a few Björk lyrics), but it’s as much a product of Iceland’s unique geology as any of those. The Nordic island country straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates meet, molding a volcanic terrain webbed by glacial rivers and studded with gemstone-aquamarine lakes. The abundant water and underground heat is harnessed by hydroelectric dams and geothermal power stations to produce cheap, green electricity that facilitates the energy-intensive process of confirming cryptocurrency transactions—called mining, since miners are rewarded for their efforts with newly minted and extremely volatile “coins.” The fact temperatures rarely top 57 degrees Fahrenheit also helps.

It wasn’t long after Bitcoin‘s creation on January 3, 2009 that cryptocurrency companies began moving to Iceland. In 2016, large data centers accounted for nearly 1 percent of its GDP, with cryptocurrency mining operations making up 90 percent of those. They now use more electricity than all of Iceland’s homes combined, with electric bills at Enigma running more than $1 million per month. But however green the energy, miners still can’t escape a dilemma as old as picks and shovels: how to extract resources without marring the landscape. According to local experts cited by The Wall Street Journal, keeping up with demand for electricity requires building more dams and power stations that could alter Iceland’s unique, sensitive environment.

That tension intrigues Barnard. She became interested in cryptocurrencies while working on her new book The Canary and the Hammer, a visual exploration of gold. It piqued her interest in digital “gold” that isn’t controlled by a central bank, leading her from Bitcoin meet-ups in Japan, the first country to officially recognize cryptocurrencies, to data centers in Iceland, where they’re mined on an industrial scale. “I was interested in this idea of it being an equitable currency,” Barnard says, “and yet it has the potential to be very destructive as far as the land is concerned.”

So, after photographing Enigma, she also ventured out to Svartsengi geothermal power station (which supplies electricity to crypto-miners and water to the Insta-famous Blue Lagoon) and other sites of thermal activity. Standing before ethereal, bubbling pools, she felt an almost palpable connection to the inner workings of the earth, “both terrifying and beautiful at the same time,” she says. The sulphur-smelling waters steamed and hissed, many decibels below the crypto-digital roar to which they’re weirdly—and maybe inextricably—linked.

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