As you splendid readers no doubt recall, an annual tradition at the Global Worldwide Headquarters is the Counting of the Photogs in the New York Times “Year in Pictures” special section published at the end of every December (previous photo finishes here).
The Year in Pictures 2023 comes literally wrapped in human tragedy, with this image spanning the front and back covers.
“This woman was going from body to body, searching for her killed siblings. When she found her pregnant sister, she started talking to her and saying, ‘You were scared of giving birth and now you are rested before you had to go through it.’ She was talking to her dead brothers and saying their names and their positive attributes.” —Samar Abu Elouf
The collection features six more examples of Samar Abu Elouf’s chronicle of the Israel-Hamas war, one photo more heart-wrenching than the last.
GAZA CITY, OCT. 12.
Wounded children arrived at Al Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex, after an airstrike on the Shati refugee camp. Hospitals relied on generators after Israel blocked water, electricity and fuel from entering Gaza.
DEIR AL BALAH, GAZA STRIP, OCT. 22.
Khaled Joudeh, 9, mourning over the body of his 8-month-old sister, Misk. He had already said goodbye to his mother, father, older brother and sister, all killed in Israeli airstrikes.
The photo section also includes five pictures taken by Tamir Kalifa, who captured the uncertainty of war . . .
HERZLIYA, ISRAEL, OCT. 14.
Friends and relatives of Maya Regev, 21, and her brother Itay Regev, 18, watching a news segment about the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas. The siblings, who were later released, had attended the Tribe of Nova festival, where gunmen massacred hundreds of young people and abducted others.
. . . and the finality of gun violence.
UVALDE, TEXAS, APRIL 19.
Caitlyne Gonzales, 11, dancing to Taylor Swift songs at the grave of her friend Jackie Cazares, who was one of the 19 students killed last year in a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.
Others with multiple contributions to the year-end review include Amir Hamja . . .
WASHINGTON, NOV. 4.
A view on Pennsylvania Avenue as thousands of demonstrators marched in support of Palestinians. Rallies across the country reflected the many groups calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.
Erin Schaff . . .
CHOCTAW, OKLA., MAY 29.
Ann Brown, left, soothed her daughter, Shawn Armstrong, who had recently tried to hang herself after learning that her son, Josh Askins, an addict, had been arrested and charged with murder in the fentanyl death of a friend.
Nanna Heitmann . . .
ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA, AUG. 29.
Hundreds of police officers and National Guard troops surrounded the Porokhovskoye cemetery, where Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the Russian mercenary boss, was buried two months after he led a brief mutiny against Russian military leadership.
Tyler Hicks . . .
“I saw what I originally thought was just a uniform that had been discarded on the road, but on closer inspection I realized it was a body. There had been no effort made to move the body. He’d been run over so many times that he became impacted to the point that the body had become part of the road.” —Tyler Hicks
Sergey Ponomarev . . .
DOUAR TNIRT, MOROCCO, SEPT. 11.
A man sat in front of his destroyed house in the Atlas Mountains after a 6.8-magnitude earthquake devastated rural towns near the southwestern city of Marrakesh and killed nearly 3,000 people.
. . . and Dave Sanders.
BROOKLYN, JUNE 7.
For days, the Brooklyn Bridge, along with much of the Midwest and East Coast, was shrouded in reddish haze from wildfires in Quebec and Ontario. New York experienced its worst air quality on record.
Thankfully, not every image the Times published last year was somber or sobering, as managing editor Mark Lacey notes in the section’s introduction.
[You’ll] find images here — collected by two photo editors, Jeffrey Henson Scales and Tanner Curtis — of war and fashion. A devastating wildfire and a day spent playing in the surf. A plume of smoke from a train accident and an ultrafancy debutante ball. Military standoffs and the tennis champion Coco Gauff, lying on the court after winning the U.S. Open.
There are three dozen other photojournalists represented in this stunning visual diary of the past year. By all means, go find them.
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