From retro images altered with AI to a blistering series on the state of women’s prisons, this year’s nominees for the prestigious £30,000 prize showcase their best work

The Pulitzer prize-winner has worked across the developing world, braved war zones and been taken hostage in Libya, but do we really need a tour of her beautiful home?

The tumultuous life and career of Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario is the subject of this National Geographic film, produced and directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (who made the climbing documentary Free Solo and the biopic Nyad with Annette Bening as the endurance swimmer Diana Nyad). Addario’s work is certainly amazing and courageous. She has captured compelling images in Ukraine, where her picture of civilian fatalities helped mobilise western opinion against Putin; in Libya, where she was terrifyingly held captive for days along with three other colleagues from the New York Times; and across the developing world where her images of maternal death have been a spur to charitable work around the globe.

Addario is a smart, candid interviewee – we also get shots of broadcast-journalism A-listers including Christiane Amanpour and Katie Couric – who is alive to the dangers of adrenalin addiction and a world in which journalists are increasingly considered fair game in war zones. She is alive also, I think, to the dangers of producing images that are too artistically beautiful. Hers is a job for tough people only; one US army officer calls her “as hard as woodpecker lips” and I believe him.

Star-studded work from Simpson, whose instincts also led to success in jewelry design, is assembled in a new photo book

Coreen Simpson carved her own path to success – she never waited for anyone to hand her an opportunity. In her 1978 portrait of Toni Morrison, the author gazes directly into the camera with a striking expression that holds the viewer’s eyes fixed on hers.

A shadow fills the space between Morrison and the world, compelling the audience to reckon with her presence. The cigarette held effortlessly in Morrison’s hand is a gesture to her power and influence as a literary giant. The image captures the essence of Simpson’s photography, seamlessly revealing the nature of her subjects while commanding their presence in the world.

The philistine thieves skipped the museum’s real treasures in favour of dull royal knick-knacks. Was the French interior minister serious when he talked about their ‘immeasurable heritage value’?

I am furious. My instructions had been perfectly clear: break into the Louvre, head for the Denon wing and deliver me the Leonardo da Vincis. Instead, what did they do? Brought me trinkets! Stand there, over the trap door. A bit more to the right.

It would be nice to think an art collector supervillain somewhere was punishing the Louvre raiders for their moronic bad taste. Admittedly, security around the Mona Lisa has improved since it was last stolen in 1911, but the museum’s other Leonardos just hang on the wall like other paintings. And there is so much beauty, so many quiet galleries, scattered through this vast former palace: the thieves could have got out with a Chardin still life, a Rogier van der Weyden, an ancient Mesopotamian statuette.

Magnum partners with Aperture for its square print sale titled Youth. Capturing the electric charge of growing up, from Dennis Stock’s portrait of James Dean, and Danny Clinch’s shot of Bruce Springsteen, to Philippe Halsman’s image of Brigitte Bardot, Martin Parr’s Friday nighters, Robert Capa’s teenagers on a film set, and Raymond Depardon’s bubble-gum blowers

• Proceeds from the sale, in part, directly benefit the artists and support Aperture’s non-profit publishing and educational programming

• Over 100 signed or estate-stamped, museum-quality 6x6 prints available online from $110/£110/€120 until Sunday 26 October, 11.59 pm EDT

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

When the war breaks out in Ukraine, Alisa is thrown into a life she wasn’t expecting. Working as a translator for foreign journalists she meets British war photographer Anastasia, who chooses not to rush towards the front, instead observing quiet moments of everyday resilience - birthdays, picnics, weddings. A unique friendship forms as the two women strive to collapse the emotional distance between “us” and “them”. Their bond deepens as war wounds them both —transforming this into a poetic meditation on closeness, distance, and what happens when war stops being a story about others.

Read more about Alisa and Anastasia’s unique bond here.

Almost a decade after becoming the Turner’s second youngest winner, the artist talks about her dazzling new opera sets, her paper bag collection – and the sadness she felt when her work was wildly misinterpreted

‘I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard,” says Helen Marten. “I’ve literally not taken a day off for four months.” The artist is talking about 30 Blizzards, a two-hour opera for which she was commissioned, by Art Basel Paris and the fashion brand Miu Miu, to write the libretto and design the staging. Featuring 30 main characters – named things like The Mother, The Baker, The Asphalt, The Forest – and a chorus collectively called Dust, the whole piece moves from “deepest night through all of these iterations of the day – dawn, afternoon, then back to deepest night”. It will take place in a space 200 metres long, with the audience able to mingle with the performers throughout.

It sounds exhausting, but Marten, by her own admission, is “a total workaholic”. During our lengthy chat, she repeatedly darts off to leaf through a file, pull up a video, glance through a book, or play a voice memo – talking all the while.

Photojournalist who covered the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the collapse of communism in eastern Europe

The photographer Brian Harris, who has died aged 73 of cancer, left school at 16 to become a messenger boy, and went on to become one of the most respected British photojournalists of his generation.

He travelled the world as a freelance or a staffer for Fleet Street titles including the Times, the Independent (where he was the founding chief photographer), the Sun and the Guardian, covering such events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, famine in Ethiopia and Sudan, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, war zones in the Balkans and across Africa, the aftermath of the Falklands war and four US presidential campaigns, including Bill Clinton’s. He also created lyrical landscapes of the countryside around his Essex home.

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

Dr Tom May, a mycologist at the Royal Botanic Gardens and an expert witness at the Erin Patterson trial, has collaborated with renowned fungi photographer Stephen Axford for Planet Fungi, a new book from CSIRO Publishing full of incredible macro-photography

The art adviser captured a portrait of her famous father – the photographer Joel Meyerowitz – as he pointed his camera at her during a visit to an exhibition

As a child, Ariel Meyerowitz would follow her famous father around with a little Olympus XA camera and mimic his work as a photographer. Once home, he’d edit the images on a slide projector, inviting his daughter to sit alongside him. “He loved having a little shadow,” Meyerowitz recalls. “Watching him click through the slides, I learned not just to look at the world but to really see it, to notice the relationship between people and place, the colour of everything, and the humour or poignancy of it all.”

To the wider world, that “perpetually creative, present and loving” father is Joel Meyerowitz, the renowned American photographer. He is also the man in this photo, photographing his daughter who is in turn photographing both him and a sculpture on display at Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s show The Rainbow Body.

Morgan Library & Museum, New York

Famed impressionist painter’s lesser-seen drawings are the focus of a major new exhibition that invites us into the stages of his artistic process

His luminous colours and sensual brushwork adorn countless mugs, posters and tote bags as well as blockbuster exhibitions. But the commodification of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and his fellow impressionist painters has been missing something.

Renoir was an accomplished draftsman who produced a distinguished but largely unheralded collection of drawings, pastels, watercolours and prints.

£2,000-a-ticket event, where 800 guests will hobnob among world’s treasures, could herald new reality in desperate arts funding climate

There will be champagne, of course, and dancing, fine Indian food served alongside the Parthenon marbles and cocktails mixed in front of the Renaissance treasures of the Waddesdon bequest. And everywhere – from the lights illuminating the Greek revival architecture, to the carpet on which guests arrive, to the glamorous outfits they are requested to wear – a very particular shade of pink.

When the British Museum throws open its doors on Saturday evening for its first “pink ball”, it will not only be hosting an enormous and lavish party, but also inaugurating what its director, Nicholas Cullinan, has called a “flagship national event” that he hopes will become as important to his institution’s finances as it will to the London elite’s social calendar.

The sweeping exhibition Monuments, which features 19 contemporary artists, opens in LA on 23 October

In 2021, the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, finally removed the Confederate statues that had inspired a series of violent and eventually deadly white supremacist rallies in 2017.

The statue of Robert E Lee, which had been surrounded by white men with torches in a famous far-right propaganda image, was melted down. But the statue of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, which stood at the heart of a 2017 Ku Klux Klan rally, was given to a California-based arts non-profit, which pledged to use it for “transformation, not further veneration”.

The hostage release, floods in Mexico, protests in Madagascar and polar bears in an abandoned research station: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

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

Small worlds go under the microscope, botanical art is investigated, and renegades come in for a reckoning – all in your weekly dispatch

The Singh Twins and Flora Indica
A look at the colonial history behind British botany, plus a survey of Indian botanical art in the age of the East India Company.
• Kew Gardens, London, until 12 April

As Sámi culture is threatened by the climate emergency and hostility from Nordic nations, the artist has built a structure of resistance: a labyrinthine artwork of animal pelts and bones based on a reindeer’s nasal passages

Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They’ve sunbathed before an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters and witnessed AI-powered robotic jellyfish floating through the air. But this is the first time they will be taking a deep dive into a reindeer’s nose. The latest artist commission for the cavernous space – by the Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara – invites gallerygoers into a labyrinthine structure based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer’s nasal passages. Once inside they can meander round or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to Sámi elders telling stories and imparting knowledge.

Why the nose? It might sound whimsical but the installation pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer’s nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to survive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose up to larger than human size, Sara says, “creates a sense of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature”. The artist is a former journalist, children’s author and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. “Maybe that creates the potential to shift your perspective or trigger some humbleness,” she adds.

The revered 83-year-old Mexican photographer talks about her groundbreaking career as she celebrates her first ever retrospective in New York

If you’re at all familiar with contemporary Latin American photography, you’ve probably encountered the unforgettable image of a Zapotec woman crowned with live iguanas, radiating quiet, unshakable dignity. Captured in 1979 by Graciela Iturbide, Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, Juchitán was neither planned nor staged. It was taken on impulse, guided by the artist’s instinct and deep respect for her subject, and has since become a touchstone of Mexican visual culture and feminist photography.

“What drives my work is surprise, wonder, dreams, and imagination,” Iturbide recently told the Guardian.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

The museum has declined to answer key questions about the decision to return the artwork, prompting the New York-based researcher who uncovered the story to challenge the NGV’s handling of the case

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The National Gallery of Victoria has quietly returned a 17th-century painting to the descendants of a Jewish family who lost it during the Nazi era, without public announcement or explanation.

The painting, Lady with a Fan by Gerard ter Borch, was removed from the NGV’s website in early September. The only public trace of its return appeared weeks later, in an update to the Lost Art Database in Germany.

With its shimmering ginkgo trees, tinkling pools and a rooftop garden, the Appleby Blue Almshouse housing complex for older people is a worthy winner of RIBA’s prestigious Stirling prize

Described as “a provision of pure delight”, Appleby Blue Almshouse, a social housing complex for older people has been named this year’s winner of the RIBA Stirling prize. With a vibe that has more in common with an Alpine spa hotel than the poky rooms and grim corridors usually associated with housing for elderly people, the building – by architects Witherford Watson Mann – reinvents the almshouse for the modern era as a place of care, shelter and social connection.

As a building type, the origins of almshouses extend back centuries, giving a semblance of dignity to the poor, the old, the sick and the marginalised. Sequestered from the outside world, with cellular dwellings arrayed around courtyards, they evoke a sense of pastoral benevolence.