We asked an international group of 12 artists, designers, photographers and activists to provide one image that encapsulates what inequality means to them — and to explain their selection. The results are stunning and thought-provoking. Warning: some of them might make you cry.

Aaron Huey didn’t mean to become an advocate for Native American treaty rights. Yet a 2005 assignment to photograph Lakota tribe members in the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota changed all that. He tells us what happened next.