Photos from Beyond

This summer, VICE News and Motherboard partnered with LG to explore the world through the lens of mobile photography. We were given the new G4 device and took photos with it around the globe. Over a two month period, we paired photographers with our reporters to produce a collection of pieces brought to life through images.

We documented the Supreme Court's landmark gay marriage ruling in Michigan, the deportation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, weed decriminalization parades in Portland, Oregon, a clown-themed motel in Nevada, a long-term nuclear waste store in Yucca Mountain, Venus Flytrap Poaching in North Carolina, rat hunting in New York City, water conservation efforts on the Salton Sea, a flying NASA laboratory and more.

Here is a quick glimpse at some of the fascinating images.

At the California Extreme Classic Arcade Show, a huge meeting of pinball machine collectors in Santa Clara, California, guests bring everything from pinball machines, vintage arcade classics, and extreme rarities that never made it to market.

Pre-embargo American cars are still used in Havana and around Cuba. Those with original parts are extremely expensive, but most have been rebuilt by specialized "talleros," – an older generation of city-dwellers who grew up with the cars and know them inside out.

In 2013, a Dominican Supreme Court ruling stripped an estimated half-million Dominicans of Haitian descent of their citizenship, leaving them essentially stateless. Thousands crowed the streets around the Ministry of the Interior in Santo Domingo to register with the government in hopes of preventing their own immediate deportation.

On June 26th, April DeBeoer and Jayne Rowse gave a press conference following the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of same-sex marriage at the Jim Toy Community Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After the landmark ruling, several same-sex couples acquired marriage licenses and tied the knot, officially.

Mauna Kea is the most sacred mountain in Hawaiian culture, considered by the native Hawaiian religion to be the focal point of the entire planet. It's also the best place in the Northern Hemisphere to build a telescope, which is why the scientists behind the Thirty Meter Telescope–slated to open in 2024–selected the summit for their powerful new observatory. However, the construction has faced strong opposition and protest from the native community

The Hoover Dam's concrete was poured in the 1930's and is still curing inside of the walls of the dam, and will be for another 60 years before it is completely set. It remains an unrivaled feat of engineering, withstanding great pressure from the Colorado River.

A fatal stabbing-spree by an ultra-Orthodox man at Jerusalem's LGBT pride march on July 30th of this year shocked the city, Israel, and the world. In the aftermath of the deadly attack, in which 16-year-old Shira Banki was murdered, the Holy City's LGBT and Orthodox communities were thrust into crisis mode.

In early August, a week before the one year anniversary of the fatal police shooting of unarmed black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, members and supporters of the NAACP converged in Selma, Alabama, to embark on a historic march under the banner: "Our lives, our votes, our jobs, and our schools matter."

NASA uses its DC-8 jetliner as a flying laboratory. It's a tricked out plane from the 1960's that's been retrofitted with an incredible array of sensors. The body has been stripped out and replaced with lab benches and scientific equipment used to measure things like climate change and atmospheric anomalies. It's the largest flying laboratory in the world.

More than 10,000 people in the Navajo Nation – which includes parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado – live without regular access to clean drinking water. The water situation is a result of isolated geography, extreme poverty and a legacy of uranium mining on Navajo soil. Thousands of water wells dot the reservation, but most have been marked as unsafe to drink after decades of contamination.

Sometimes it's just a distant rumble, barley felt across the prairie. Sometimes it's a violent jolt that knocks dishes out of the cabinets and cracks the walls. With 585 noticeable earthquakes in 2014, and with 2015 on track to top that record, Oklahoma is now the most seismically active state.

Humans have a history of engineering landscapes to fit our purposes, sometimes with disastrous results. The Salton Sea is California's largest lake. With prolonged drought, the water level in the sea is dropping, the salinity of the lake is increasing, and thousands of dead fish are piling up along the shore. The question is, is this a disaster of our own design?

In Kentucky, where there are still holdout clerks who refuse to marry same-sex couples, the University of Louisville School of Medicine is planning to pilot the first full-year curriculum for treating LGBT patients. Instead of an elective day-long LGBT program, which many med schools already have, the University's class of 2019 will have LGBT issues woven into their curriculum for the entirety of their medical education.

Venus flytraps are an endangered species native to North Carolina facing extinction due to illegal harvesting. The carnivorous plants grow in bogs, mostly in a 75-mile range of Wilmington. The other-worldly plants are threatened both by urban development, which has altered the condition of the plants' very specific habitat, and from poachers who sneak around the government-owned land to pick them for a quick buck.

In the weeks leading up to the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act this summer, civil rights activists in North Carolina were in the thick of a landmark trial challenging a state law that rolled back a key part of that act. Plaintiffs in NAACP vs McCory argues that a Republican-controlled legislature knowingly passed the restrictive voting law (HB589) in 2013 to keep African Americans–who have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats since the 1930s–away from polling booths.

On June 30th, 2015, hundreds gathered on the Burnside Bridge in Portland, Oregon after learning there would be free weed distributed at midnight, the moment recreational marijuana smoking became legal in the state. Though very little weed was distributed, many brought their own to share.

For more, visithttp://www.vice.com/series/photosfrombeyond