PHOTOS OF THE YEAR: Through photographers’ lenses, an epic catalog of humanity in 2024 emerges

In nearly 100 countries and all 50 U.S. states, visual journalists with The Associated Press are eyewitnesses to the world’s news, and have won 36 of AP’s 59 Pulitzer Prizes since the award was established in 1917.

AP photographers assembled a visual catalog of our civilization as life in 2024 hurtled directly at us at every speed and in every imaginable color and flavor — dizzying, unremitting, challenging the human race to make sense of it. And behind it all, the unspoken questions:

How do you stop time? How do you preserve moments? Amid all the quick cuts that cut to the quick, how do you absorb what needs to be seen and remembered?

The answer is encapsulated — as it has been for nearly two centuries now — in one word that contains multitudes and possibilities: photography.

This year, AP photographers across the world captured 2024’s vast catalogue of events, from breaking news (wars, natural disasters, an assassination attempt) to intimate moments both quiet and exuberant.

Thanks to photographers and their cameras, we were able to look down from the air. We crawled on the ground and looked up at events unfolding. We swam in the ocean. We gazed from a distance and got in front of fascinating faces. We looked straight on.

We stared at the news from oblique angles. We saw landscapes of violence and of inspiration, and we saw intimate detail that only a modern digital camera with a talented human being behind it can deliver.

We saw how people across the planet elected each other, loved each other, broke bread with each other, competed against each other in the most prestigious of forums. We saw them pray for — and with — each other, kill each other, mourn each other.

Through photographers’ lenses, from the widest of wide angles to the most formidable of zooms, we saw:

A pope alone in his chair, contemplating. Lava flowing across a burning landscape in Iceland. A former president of the United States — now its next president, too — thrusting his fist skyward in defiance after narrowly escaping an assassination attempt outside a small western Pennsylvania city.

How do we stop time in 2024? A photographer reaches the scene, presses a button. A sophisticated contraption reacts to light. Pixels are preserved, edited and transmitted across the world.

Through the lens, time stopped for a fraction of a second on Feb. 11 when Taylor Swift kissed Travis Kelce after his team, the Kansas City Chiefs, won the Super Bowl.

In these images, people fight heat, battle cold, grapple with drought, take to the sea, pass the baton, cast the fishing line, beat each other with sticks. Anxiously and expectantly, they look for better lives; sometimes, they find them.

The child was born on the water — on a boat along the River Bhramaputra in northeastern India on July 3, one of more than 100 million babies to arrive during a convulsive year. Her first tears in this world were frozen in time, made available to faraway eyes for one simple reason: a photographer was there to bear witness.

In photography, vantage point is everything. Where the camera goes is what we see. The choices that AP photographers make in mere seconds can shape how we see our world for years. Flip through these photos in that light, and they become more impactful than they already are.

Consider the case of Christophe Chavilinga, a 90-year-old man from a camp for displaced people called Munigi in eastern Congo. This year, he fell sick with mpox. By Aug. 16, blistering lesions covered great parts of his face.

That was the day that, while he waited to be treated at a clinic, he stared straight into a camera. His eyes were weary. His mouth drooped. His dignity came through in every pixel. That moment, frozen, was beamed around the world.

We saw prisoners reaching out from their cells for bread at a Paraguayan prison in July — their outstretched hands grasping, hoping for something to come their way.

Each image manages to stop the world just a little. It gives us snippets of time to think about those around us and those far from us — and how they, like so many, are muddling their way through the 21st century, trying to survive and prosper. Some succeed, some do not.

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Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation for The Associated Press, writes frequently about photography. Follow him at http://x.com/anthonyted

Ted Anthony, The Associated Press