Laif photo agency: 40 years of iconic shots

In 1986, Manfred Linke, founding member of the photo agency Laif, documented the demonstrations against the nuclear reprocessing plant planned in Wackersdorf, Bavaria. The protests turned into riots, with demonstrators throwing stones and steel balls at the police, who used CS gas against them. The construction of the plant was stopped three years later.

At Agbogbloshie, Ghana's largest scrapyard, this boy tries to get to the metal inside a TV by throwing it on the ground several times. Kai Loffelbein's photo, selected as UNICEF Photo of the Year 2011, shows the downside of globalization: Electronic waste from industrialized nations illegally ends up there.

A typical scene in the Ruhr area in the early 1980s, with its mining industry shaping the architecture of the region. Through modernization, these historical plants were, however, completely shut down. Dirk Krüll's photo captures the state of uncertainty of a region undergoing structural change.

The artist couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude spent more than two decades working on their project of wrapping the Reichstag, an installation that was finally realized in June 1995. The seat of the German government spent a full two weeks wrapped in silver fabric and blue ropes. More than five million people traveled to see the work. Wolfgang Volz was the official photographer of the project.

In the early 1990s, photographer Axel Krause documented street gangs in Colombia. Poverty drives the country's youth to steal and even murder for drug cartels. They often have to go into hiding because the police are looking for them; some have sworn revenge for their colleagues who were murdered in the fight against the cartels.

Michael Wolf explores the everyday life of subway commuters in Tokyo. As soon as the doors close, they are sometimes trapped in uncomfortable positions and can only breathe again when the doors open at the next station. In his series of striking portraits, titled "Tokyo Compression," Wolf captured the emotions and facial expressions of the commuters as they are squeezed among strangers.

A heavily guarded no-man's land known as the "death strip" ran along the wall separating East and West Berlin until it came down in 1989. Following German reunification, Bettina Flitner photographed people from the East and the West as they explored the remains of the Berlin Wall and asked them all: "What do you feel now?"

A scene from Germany's 2017 election campaign: Björn Höcke is cheered on by the audience in a victory pose after a speech. Hannes Jung accompanied the political campaign of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD). His photographs examine and comment on how politicians gain power over their audiences and become intoxicated by it.