Every winter in Japan's northern prefectures, snow monsters gather on the mountains for their yearly, um, summit.

The term in Japanese actually translates roughly to "frost-covered trees," which is what they are — a popular tourist phenomenon in Japan's ski resorts. We found these 2007 photos on our news wires and couldn't resist sharing. Have you ever seen snow monsters?

Also, here's another photo you'll get if you search "Japan" and "snow." Just saying.

The funeral procession of Kim Jong Il brought back memories of an era when images of Communist propaganda were ubiquitous. The visual backbone of the images or illustrations were usually order and symmetry, enacted on a grand scale.

Wednesday's event was no exception. An overall view of the snowy procession had it all: the framed image of Kim Jong Il in the foreground, the masses of mourners lined neatly on the sidelines, the motorcade in perfect sync and the order that is associated with a totalitarian regime — a regime with access to Photoshop.

The photo of Kim Jong Il's funeral procession was released Wednesday by the North Korean Central News Agency, and distributed by the European Pressphoto Agency, Agence-France Presse and Reuters. All three international agencies later issued a "kill" notice on the photo.

As reported by The New York Times' Lens blog, the Associated Press noticed the infraction by comparing it with a similar image released by Kyodo News, a Japanese agency. The two images were taken seconds apart, revealing what's clearly a photographic infraction by the North Korean news agency.

Viewing the images side by side, it is apparent that the editors at the North Korean Central News Agency took issue with a cluster of people on the far left-hand side of the frame. They have been digitally removed and their tracks covered with cloned snow. The position of the car is proof that two images were indeed taken within seconds of each other, leaving little time for the men to physically move out of the frame. The Times' detailed analysis of the two images and the botched Photoshop attempt can be read on the Lens blog.

While some may argue the insignificance of the edit, Bob Steele, a journalism ethics professor at DePauw University, says the bottom line is that the truth has been altered. "In this case, it is a fairly minor detail that has been changed," Steele tells NPR, "but it tells us that there is the potential for the alteration of truth in other photographs, or in any account of the story."

He adds that although the image came from an isolated nation, often the target of global skepticism, the seriousness of the matter should not be trivialized and that the manipulation of a news image from any country should not be condoned.

"To digitally alter a news photograph in a way that changes reality and deceives the public is ethically wrong," he says.

Steele recalls another notable Communist image that was altered — but this one was taken nearly 91 years ago. The original image, made in 1920, captured Russian leader Vladimir Lenin speaking to a crowd in Sverdlov Square in Moscow. In the altered image, said to have been taken within seconds of the original, fellow Central Committee members Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev, who were standing next to Lenin's podium, suddenly disappeared and were replaced with a staircase.

In 1998, Hoover Digest, a Stanford University publication, published an article titled Inside Stalin's Darkroom, in which writer Robert Conquest states that history's most egregious violations of photographic manipulation occurred during the Russian Revolution, when "there [was] something especially striking about the way in which the Soviet visual images were massively and pervasively amended."

This "visual revisionism" tried to keep up the facade of a flourishing nation that was actually mired in poverty and ruled by terror.

North Korea, too, has a facade to maintain: that of a nationalistic people who are happier than their neighbors in the South.

By late Wednesday evening, the European Pressphoto Agency had directed its clients to take down the altered image, stating: "We have since been made aware that the image has been altered by the supplier and the image was moved in error. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Steele argues that this situation should be a warning bell for all news organizations and citizens.

"We must recognize how easy it is to alter reality; when it comes to journalism and documentary photography, there must be an assumption that authenticity and truth are guiding principles. If we don't have that, then we don't have trust. And if we don't have trust, we have a breakdown in communication within society."

Ironically, the minor alteration in the larger scheme of the elusive North Korean story could heighten the cynicism of the outside world toward the isolated state, possibly having the opposite effect of that desired by its manipulators.

One of the photos that made photographer Diane Arbus famous was Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967; it reverberated in The Shining and probably influenced Mary Ellen Mark's twin photos.

It goes without saying that twins long have fascinated photographers — as well as scientists. How is it that identical twins with virtually identical DNA can be so different? Conversely, how is it that identical twins separated at birth can still have so much in common? An article in National Geographic's December issue explores the focus of recent research: How a third factor, beyond nature and nurture, might have a vital role in making us who we are. The term is epigenetics and the article explains it best.

Photographer Martin Schoeller must have jumped at the chance to shoot the portraits for this story. Once you know his style, you'll start to recognize his photos on the covers of major magazines — or in museums. I saw his enormous portraits for the first time at the National Portrait Gallery a while back. He uses a huge camera with a depth of field so famously narrow that the eyes are in focus and the nose is not.

In Schoeller's portraits, eyes are like an open book. His portraits are studies of the face's physical topography, but also of our irrepressible emotions — how they translate to the twinkle of an eye or the wrinkle on a forehead.

It's fascinating to see his style in this context. How identical are identical twins? What do you think?

When I was little, creating a wish list was one of my favorite holiday activities. And if I could have called Santa directly, I might have died of delight.

I can only imagine how these kids — now probably in their 70s — must have felt when they discovered Santa's direct line in 1947. That year, the New York City mega toy store F.A.O. Schwartz set up a line directly to their store Santa.

A few of these photos ran in a December issue of Life, but many of them were never published. The full gallery is at life.com.

Santas in the 1920s weren't quite as cheery looking as today's robust and padded fellows! Just check out these pictures from Underwood & Underwood. The news photo distribution company covered its homebase of Chicago pretty well and captured the eager faces of kids with noses pressed to store windows eyeing toys as well as the good deeds of its citizens.

These Chicago photographs come from the Photographic History Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, where there are several thousand glass plate negatives covering a range of holiday, seasonal, sports, entertainment, news and general reportage from Chicago, New York City and a bit of San Francisco.

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Shannon Thomas Perich is an associate curator of the Photographic History Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Her regular contributions to The Picture Show are pulled from the Smithsonian's archives.

Though photographer Jesse Rieser grew up celebrating Christmas, his view seems pretty clinical these days. "Are you the grinch?!" I had to ask. To which he affirmed, "I am the grinch, ha."

But really, when probed a bit further, Rieser says he just enjoys observing the distinctly American breed of Christmas. "I want people to view the series not from a judgmental angle," he explains, "but rather a celebration of people that are lucky to love something as much as they love Christmas."

The American Christmas, he writes on his site, "is complex and at times, uncomfortable. It's awkward and sometimes bleak. But it is also sincere and celebratory, colorful and creative."

He shot Christmas in America last holiday season around Arizona, and says he is currently shooting this year's edition, which will showcase a different region.

No doubt there's a magic and mania to this time of year. What do you think? Have the holidays gotten away from us? Or do you revel in decking the halls ... and the bushes and the roof and the lawn ...

Charles "Teenie" Harris didn't need to wander far during his life as a photographer. His hometown of Pittsburgh supplied enough images to sustain a career. For more than four decades, Harris was one of the principal photographers for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's pre-eminent black newspapers.

"[Teenie] has been known and loved in Pittsburgh ever since the 1930s, but his reputation outside the city is just beginning to spread," says Lulu Lippincott, curator of a new exhibition of Teenie Harris' photos at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Beginning in the 1930s, his work in Pittsburgh's storied Hill District produced a rich portrait of the African-American experience rarely displayed in Harris' contemporary American media. It's a portrait that shows both the joys and struggles of mid-20th-century urban life.

Photos of men drinking in bars and children crowding around a summer swimming pool appear alongside scenes of civil rights protests and union-backed demonstrations.

"[Teenie] conveys in a way that I've never experienced before in photographs, the immediate experience of being in a different place, a different time," says Lippincott.

His work may be understood as a celebration of the working class, but Harris didn't shy away from opportunities to show life on the other side of the tracks. His portfolio is dotted with the occasional image of some of the biggest names of the era, including Louis Armstrong, Muhammad Ali and John F. Kennedy.

"He was a studio photographer, photojournalist and advertising photographer who helped preserve African-American culture from family life to social life," Deborah Willis, a photography professor at New York University, writes in the exhibition's companion book.

One of Harris' best-loved photos shows a young boy, perhaps 7 or 8, slumped in the corner of a boxing ring, his hands weighed down by a pair of oversized gloves. The boy gazes into the camera and appears to smile as a single tear trickles down his cheek. It's a perfect distillation of Harris' catalog, where life's joyful moments are shaded — but never eclipsed — by the shadow of conflict.

The exhibition is scheduled to make stops in Chicago, Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala.

There have been countless accounts of violence recorded during the uprisings in Egypt, but the image that perhaps has captured the most attention is the most recent. The image has been widely referred to as the "girl in the blue bra."

A veiled young woman is dragged and beaten by Egyptian military during a protest in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Her face is covered. Her torso is bare, except for her bright-blue bra; she's a millisecond away from being kicked by a solider.

The image quickly became a visual symbol of abuse of power by the Egyptian military. It also became the rallying cry for several thousand Egyptian women who marched in the country's capital on Tuesday demanding the end of military rule.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a recent speech at Georgetown University that the image showed the "systematic degradation of Egyptian women [which] dishonors the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform, and is not worthy of a great people."

In response to Clinton's condemnation, Egypt's state Middle East News Agency quoted Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr as saying Egypt would not accept any interference in its internal affairs on the way security forces dealt with female protesters. And today there are reports that Kamal al-Ganzouri, Egypt's military-appointed prime minister, has called for a national dialogue to resolve the country's crisis and for a two-month calm to restore safety.

While images and stories of women's-rights abuses are not hard to find, Kenny Irby, senior faculty for visual journalism at the Poynter Institute, says the image has become an icon for the sexist and brutal use of military power because "the frame captures the horror of excessive abuse which has elevated its status."

But beyond the brutality, Irby says, "it has an aesthetic punctuation that is the blue bra."

"It has the clear suppression of female rights but also has the visual stamp which has historically been part of women's liberation protests [in America]."

Canada's National Post reported Egyptian blogger Fatenn Mostafa tweeting, "The blue bra is unforgettable and we all become 'the blue bra' girl one way or another."

Irby points out another important factor — the fact that the image is not a still frame captured by a camera but a frame grab from amateur video footage.

"We are at the point where consumers of information are not vetting the fact that it is a video or a still," Irby said. He adds that in today's fast-paced media cycle, "the masses would rather have the image and then later vet the credibility."

The veracity of this video's content cannot be denied, however, and Irby notes that the frequency of media outlets' proliferating images and video created not by professional journalists but by "authentic witnesses" is higher than at any point in history.

"This image now has the potential to impact national policy, and that has been one of the major attributes of photojournalism — images that move the hearts and minds of the public and policymakers," he said.

Years before the monster earthquake shook Japan and unleashed a massive tsunami in March, Google had mapped the roads of northeast Japan with its Street View project, as it had done in many parts of the world.

Shortly after the disaster, Google sent video teams back to the worst-hit areas to cover 44,000 square miles' worth of devastation.

With that material now in hand, Google has just released Memories for the Future, an interactive website that allows users to scroll through Street View images of Japan before and after the disaster.

Drag the slider right and left.

"We wanted to photograph and record traces of the disasters to preserve them for the next generation, so even if the areas are perfectly rebuilt, no one would ever forget what happened there," said Ken Tokesei, Google's Project Management Director in the Asia-Pacific region.

By selecting a point on a map of Japan, users can see what a specific area looked like several years ago. And with a single click, they can compare that site with the images taken by Google after the quake and tsunami — though in some cases, there is very little left to compare.

Some of the earlier images show signs of life — cars, bikes, people — but after the earthquake and tsunami, the streets are hauntingly empty.

The cruel irony of natural disasters is seen in full view as some parks, roads and buildings remain virtually unscathed even in the hardest-hit parts of the country. Other areas depict not mere damage, but utter destruction with once-dense, residential streets reduced to rubble.

In Sendai, a bike shop is razed to the ground. Tall grass grows where the building once stood, as though it never existed at all. By showing these scenes side by side, Google Street View's 360-degree imagery tells a story isolated photographs cannot fully convey.

Tokesei hopes that Memories for the Future will increase the momentum of the recovery by aiding researchers and city planners. "But more importantly," he says, "we hope the imagery will make the world realize the scope of the disaster and see through a virtual tour that these communities are still not fully recovered and need the world's support."

The pace of news is getting faster and faster — especially when a story can be captured in a single image. We were flooded with photos from the Middle East uprisings this year. And floods dominated the news, too; in Japan, Thailand, Vicksburg, scenes of high waters made a lasting impression.

It was a year of destruction and disaster — the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the back-to-back tragedies in Japan. But there were also the lighthearted events: a royal wedding and a good year for Ryan Gosling, if you know your memes, but we won't go there.

For better or worse, here are some of the images that topped our click charts.

Jan. 9: The office of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords releases photos from the hospital that show nothing more than her hand.

Read More

Frozen. Paranoid. Stark. Controlled. These are the kinds of adjectives used by journalists to describe the highly centralized communist state of North Korea.

Since the establishment of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1948, the North Korean government has maintained a tight grip on all communications with the outside world. We only see what they want us to see.

NPR's Louisa Lim was allowed a rare five-day visit to the isolated nation in October 2009, and as she reported, her every movement was strictly controlled and monitored. She was not allowed to talk to ordinary North Koreans, use the currency or leave her hotel unaccompanied. She said she felt like she had stepped back in time.

In July 2011, Associate Press photographer David Guttenfelder and Seoul bureau chief Jean H. Lee reported for The New York Times that they were given "unprecedented access" beyond the dictated path. They were allowed to travel throughout the countryside accompanied by North Korean journalists as opposed to government minders. They reported catching glimpses of "candid moments [that] put a human face" on a country seen mostly in staged visits.

Above are Getty photographer Feng Li's images, from an April 2011 visit to North Korea's capital, Pyongyang. Though they show "daily life," one can't help but wonder what's not photographed.

There is an eerie similarity to many of the images photojournalists bring back from this enigmatic nation. There seems to be a surreal order and a visual symmetry to daily life, which appears highly orchestrated. Bursts of color appear in an otherwise monochromatic landscape. The images can be mesmerizing — and seem to prompt more questions than answers.

The statue stands at the center of the train platform in Vladivostok, Russia.

"9288."

That's the number of kilometers from Moscow, and the rough distance we have just traveled by train to cross the world's largest country. That's nearly 6,000 miles.

We're in Asia now.

South Korean businessmen crowd the Hotel Hyundai.

Two new bridges are going up as Vladivostok improves its image and infrastructure ahead of hosting the 2012 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference.

And, there's the Pyongyang Café.

Waitresses serve up North Korean barbecue and sing karaoke. Our server, 22 years old, says she's on a three-year work visa from nearby North Korea. She says she's excited to return home to her family in Pyongyang when her time in Russia is up.

European Russia could not feel farther away. And Russians who live here feel little connection to Moscow.

All of that raises a question: If this month's anti-government protests in Moscow signal an era of political change, what role will Russians 9,000 kilometers from the capital play? Could there be a truly national movement afoot to challenge Vladimir Putin, the prime minister and likely-president-to-be?

There's certainly an angry mood here in Russia's Far East - and little fondness for Putin.

People here are still upset that Moscow, during the economic downturn, imposed stiff tariffs on imported used cars.

In Vladivostok, Japanese vehicles dominate the roads. That presents a unique challenge - driving on the right side of the road when the steering wheel is on the right side of the car. (Watching your taxi driver attempt to peer around the vehicle in front of him to determine whether it's safe to pass can give the most courageous passengers heartburn).

No matter - people here want their Toyotas. In 2008, protests over the tariffs grew so boisterous in this coastal city that the Kremlin had to ship police officers in from Moscow to calm things down.

People in Vladivostok also complain that Putin has stifled economic development here by, in their view, refusing to let the Far East go its own way and expand trade and business ties with China.

But it's not clear where the anger over these regional issues are heading.

In The Far East, A Small Protest

Like several dozen other cities across Russia, Vladivostok staged a protest over the disputed parliamentary election results this month. But the event numbered in the hundreds, not thousands, as in Moscow.

This week, local members of the Communist party - one of the leading opposition parties in Russia - tried to keep up the momentum in Vladivostok. They held an anti-Putin gathering near the seaport, beside a World War II Soviet submarine that's now a museum.

There were perhaps 20 or so protestors, clinging to anti-Putin signs. They were nearly outnumbered by news photographers.

The next chance to send a message may be Dec. 24, when opposition leaders in Moscow plan a fresh anti-government demonstration. People in Vladivostok will have their chance to join and let the voices of the Far East be heard.

At a café in downtown Vladivostok this week, Maxim Moskvitin overheard our reporting team speaking English and asked if he could sit down with us and chat. Maxim is finishing his final year of graduate school in engineering. He follows politics closely - home and abroad - and was proud to show off his BBC "App" on his tablet computer.

He's sick of a Russian government that he says is too powerful and too intrusive in the lives of its citizens. He's frustrated that much of his family lives in villages that are impoverished.

He believes change will come.

But the street protests in December, he says, captured more attention abroad than at home. The world, Maxim says, may want Russia to have a revolution, but too many Russians — including himself — fear full-scale revolution could weaken the country.

He's hoping to find a job in the United States or Australia in the short term. "I just want to live in a comfortable and stable country," he says.

As for Russia's future? Maxim predicts that as a younger generation grows up, the population will be less likely to tolerate a leader of Putin's mold. But if there's indeed political upheaval in the air in Russia today, Maxim doesn't expect much to change quickly. And he's not yet prepared to join the fight.

Photographer Sebastian Meyer is somewhat new to the trade. He's been shooting since 2004, and has been in Iraq since 2009. But he's already trying to change the industry: "I personally, as someone who photographs here, am kind of tired of how foreigners see Iraq."

So he teamed up with Kamaran Najm to form the first Iraqi photo agency, Metrography. Meyer says the idea came when Najm, a photo editor and native Iraqi, had no central place to find pictures. Today, the agency represents some 60 Iraqi photographers. Surprisingly, there's now no shortage of photographers; if anything, the problem is a shortage of work.

The reality is that there's just not a huge demand for local photography within Iraq. The average price per picture in an Iraqi news magazine is about $8, Meyer says. Most people rip them illegally from the Web anyway.

"The thing I'm very focused on is reminding people that Iraqi photographers don't just have to photograph Iraq," Meyer offers. "American photographers work all over the world. Just because we're an Iraqi photo agency doesn't mean that our photographers are limited to photographing Iraq."

The odds are stacked against them, though. It's hard enough to survive as a photographer these days, let alone as an agency, to say nothing of an agency in the Middle East.

Plus, in a world flattened by the Internet, how relevant is nationality, really? Do you have to be from a place to really get it? Meyer would argue in the affirmative: "I know some brilliant photographers who have an amazing gift at getting close to someone ... but when you speak the language, there's an intimacy that comes out in the images that you don't see in a lot of foreign stuff."

The for-profit aspect of assignments and commissions is only half of Metrography. The other and arguably more important half, Meyer says, is about training: "What we're really about is teaching photographers how to tell stories."

Take Binar Sardar, for example. She had little experience when she showed up to one of Metrography's summer workshops. Now she's in the position to turn down a mentorship offer from renowned photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair. Not that she wants to turn it down; another unfortunate reality, Meyer explains, is that most of these photographers still have full-time jobs — and can't afford to leave them.

Sardar, being a woman, is an exceptional case. The large majority of Metrography photographers are men, which comes as no surprise. "The biggest problem we face is that journalism isn't considered a particularly classy kind of job," says Meyer. "The other issue, obviously, is gender, where a lot of women aren't allowed to work in the country — especially [if] they'd have to go out and talk to a lot of people."

But Sardar's doing it, at least on the side. As a working woman, she takes an interest in working women. One of her projects tells the story of an Iraqi policewoman.

So what's the photography culture like in Iraq? "I think a lot of people just like photography — just like we do in the States," Meyer says. His goal is to provide Iraqis with tools to establish a local viewpoint, and to get eyes on it.

From 1955 to 1960, a Cleveland DJ named Tommy Edwards had the bright idea to snap photos of folks who came through his studio. Credited by some as being the first to recognize and promote Elvis, for example, Edwards had a sixth sense for what would one day be important. Maybe he knew that those photos would become among the most comprehensive color records of the early rock 'n' roll culture. Or maybe not.

Either way, Edwards fastidiously captured candid moments on Ektachrome slide film. His collection included a young Elvis Presley, a pre-shades Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash at 25 — as well as pop stars and Hollywood hopefuls. After Edwards' death in 1981, the photos all but disappeared from memory — until recently.

"It was like in the movies, when the treasure hunter's shovel suddenly hits something hard," says Christopher Kennedy, recalling the moment when he first saw Edwards' photos. A musician himself and music-history buff, Kennedy reached out to Edwards' nephew, who discovered the entire stash of photos in his basement.

"It was an amazing experience for me, when I traveled from New York to Wisconsin to see the collection for the first time — hundreds of ... slides projected onto Tommy Edwards' nephew's basement wall," Kennedy recalls.

He almost immediately got to work on a book. It's a small but tidy slice of Americana — an endearing portrait of our rock 'n' roll legends in their youth. "It was cool and thrilling to be able to breathe life back into a lost piece of history," Kennedy says.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland will be curating a Tommy Edwards photo exhibit from January to May of next year.