Alison Wright has photographed her share of beautiful places, but her heart lies in telling the stories of people living in the shadows of where the tourists go. “As photojournalists, we were brought up to not get emotionally involved. I want to get involved. If that makes me an activist, that’s fine. I don’t care about the title. Image-making is an incredibly powerful tool,” she told me in a recent interview.

No matter where an assignment might take her, she is always on the lookout for stories that speak to her personal mission of humanitarian photography. “I like having a focus,” Wright says, “but then I always factor in time to explore something more.”

A trip to Thailand in late