Family: A Celebration of Humanity (M.I.L.K.)

In this stunning pictorial journal, 100 talented professional and amateur photographers, many of them award winners, have captured the essence of our most profound relationship: family. Cutting across race and nationality, their photographs -- chosen from 40,000 entries worldwide -- bring to life the intimate moments and emotions shared by all families, whether in Australia, Rwanda, Colombia, or the United States.

Taken from the most ambitious photographic competition and exhibit ever staged, the M.I.L.K. Collection -- Moments of Intimacy, Laughter, and Kinship -- these photos depict the joy, heartbreak, and love that shaped and make up our lives. Here are the bonds that bring us together as parent and child, sister and brother, youth and elder. From a father's first look at his new baby to a weathered grandma's embrace, the laughter of octogenarian uncle and nephew to the promise of a mother's kiss, these powerful images tell the story of humanity and celebrate its deepest emotional connection.

The M.I.L.K. project was conceived to honor what it is to be part of a family. Look at the men, women, and children on these pages. In their faces you will recognize yourself and your loved ones, for you, too, are a member of the great kinship that is the human family. As James McBride writes, "without family, we are all a tribe of nomads, cut adrift, disconnected, wandering the earth with neither time nor place nor history to give our aching souls a home." Family is a universal homecoming, a commemoration of the human spirit itself.