Alexander Gronsky’s photograph of families in the snow hints at something more dubious

The photographer Alexander Gronsky calls the series of pictures he took in Moscow suburbs, after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Something Is Going on Here. This image of families in the snow has a kind of dubious innocence. It is juxtaposed in other photos in the collection with military vehicles idling in these same winter landscapes at the edge of the city, and uniformed Russian soldiers mingling with ordinary residents. The contrast gives all of the images a disturbing edge of menace. You find yourself looking hard, for example, at the couple of figures on the right of this picture, in authoritarian black, and wondering how they fit with the people in the primary-coloured jackets. They are part of a landscape in which “normal life” is never quite what it seems.

Gronsky was born in Estonia, and has been based in Russia for most of his career – despite being arrested in the anti-Putin protests of 2015. He has long been drawn to the curious hinterlands at the edge of cities, places half-developed or awaiting development, bulldozers standing by, tower blocks not completed. In a recent interview he explained how he was drawn to these areas because those “edgelands” represented an uncertain kind of escape from the normal rules of cities that require you to walk on the pavement and behave yourself. “Suddenly,” he said, “there’s a gap in the fence, and beyond lies an abandoned construction site. Different rules apply in this space – there are no ethical boundaries; you can use this place as a restroom or smash beer bottles.” That kind of unwritten licence creates what Gronsky documents as a new kind of uneasy “pastoral” where norms become unruly, borders porous, and everywhere is a sort of no man’s land, where – good or bad – “anything can happen”.

Alexander Gronsky is at Galerie Le Château d’Eau, Toulouse, until 23 March

In some of the photographs you have to squint hard to see it – sandwiched between tree trunks or cloaked in fog. In others, it’s so close up that all you see are rivets or the cross-hatching of metal beams. In his series Thirty-Six Views of the Golden Gate Bridge (the title nods to Katsushika Hokusai’s famous woodcut prints of Mount Fuji), US photographer Arthur Drooker set out to defamiliarise the great Californian landmark, asking: “Is it possible to see the most photographed bridge in the world anew?” After two years on the project, he came away with “deep admiration” for its builders who defied predictions that the mile-wide strait could never be bridged. “What I found most resonant,” says Drooker, “even more than the span’s status as an engineering and architectural icon, is its power as a symbol of possibility.”

• Thirty-Six Views of the Golden Gate Bridge is available from arthurdrooker.com

The reality star turned documentary maker on being a shy child, growing up with dyslexia and ADHD, and how TV has given her confidence

Born in London in 1991, Olivia Attwood shot to fame as a contestant on the third series of Love Island. The reality TV universe beckoned – Attwood joined the cast of The Only Way Is Essex and Celebs Go Dating. She then stepped into TV presenting, making documentaries about trolls, cosmetic surgery, and in the third season of her ITV show Getting Filthy Rich, young entrepreneurs selling sex. She lives between London and Cheshire with her husband, the footballer Bradley Dack.

The eyes are giving Princess Diana, as if there’s some pending, awful news on the horizon. I loved doing ballet but I was a shy and anxious child, always pondering. My parents are staggered by the shift that’s happened in me over the last decade, because for that kid in the photo, the idea of being the centre of attention was horrifying. There was one time I was asked to go to the front in a dance class, and the concept of being under the spotlight made me run out of the door.

From Brooke Shields on abuse and ageing to fashion outfits chosen by AI: the best original photographs from the Observer commissioned in January 2025

Exploring themes of identity, heritage and individuality, the Ghanaian photographer used surreal colours to add a dreamlike quality

Reginald Kofi Boateng had spent his morning scouting the perfect location and gathering props. “The day was steeped with intention,” says Boateng, who comes from Koforidua, in eastern Ghana and now lives in Dansoman, in the capital, Accra.

“Dansoman is a sprawling estate and a place of contrasts,” he says. “Stories are waiting to be uncovered in its bustling streets and quiet corners. This setting became the perfect backdrop to explore themes of identity, heritage and individuality.”

From dancers to divas, amputees to activists: what images of the human form throughout the decades tell us about who we are

There is no image more compelling to us than to see another human being naked. Thousands of years of evolution and desire, of empathy and curiosity, hardwire us to stare. The sight is visceral, electrifying, irresistible. It is familiar and forbidden; innocence and sin. The naked body is there in the bathroom mirror every morning, but to see another always feels like stumbling on a secret. A salt-twist of narcissism heightens our emotions, so that looking at a nude feels very different from admiring a watercolour landscape. Ethics come into it. In the history of portraiture, it is the nudes that are the most honest, or the most exploitative – or sometimes both.

Photographs are part of the fabric of everyday life for all of us, in a way charcoal sketches or oil paintings are not. So when a nude is not a sketch or a painting but a photograph, the intensity ratchets up. The polite distance of the art gallery experience is stripped away, leaving gut reaction and raw emotion. All of which is to say: nothing like a nude photograph to get you by the jugular.

Palestinians return to Gaza, Americans survey the aftermath of the Palisades fire and Hindus gather at the Shahi Snan in India: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

• Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

• Warning: graphic content