Years come and go, sometimes before we even realize that time has passed. Events blur and run together. The news is overwhelming, and even those who follow it closely can feel a sense of unremitting vertigo. Such is 21st-century life on a connected and chaotic planet.<\/p>\n
But people \u2014 people stand out, no matter where they may be. And moments in time have the power to freeze the world with the snap of a digital camera\u2019s shutter, over and over around the planet \u2014 from Gaza to Ukraine, the Philippines to Haiti, Maine to the White House to California and so many points in between.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what The Associated Press\u2019 corps of photographers documented in 2025: the frenzied and the quiet, the bloody and the contemplative, and even healthy doses of joy, wonder and discovery to help us see that our violent and sometimes inexplicable world is full of good things, too.<\/p>\n
In over 200 locations globally, photojournalists with the AP are trusted eyewitnesses to news and have won 36 of AP\u2019s Pulitzer Prizes since the award was established in 1917.<\/p>\n
They are far more than eyewitnesses, though. They are journalists, explorers, artists, understanders. They are experts in vantage point and light, in people skills and storytelling.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it\u2019s the color: the saturated, angry oranges in Etienne Laurent\u2019s arresting image of firefighters in California battling a blaze that had engulfed a beachfront property in Malibu, California.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it\u2019s the action and the movement: Robert F. Bukaty\u2019s photo of the back half of a sturgeon, propelling itself fiercely through the waters of Maine and leaving bubbles in its wake. Or the kinetic energy that bursts from Aaron Favila\u2019s frame of men massing to salvage electrical wire after a fire in a poor Philippine community.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it\u2019s what photographers call \u201cnegative space\u201d: Petros Giannakouris\u2019 image of the Parthenon and the moon at night, their magnificence dramatically amplified by the midnight-blue sky that fills most of the frame.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it is juxtaposition across images and continents: Niranjan Shrestha\u2019s photo of a demonstrator in Nepal, his hair cascading behind him and his arms outstretched after he grabbed a flak jacket and a shield from a policeman during the chaos of a protest \u2014 and its mirror image of joy, Andy Wong\u2019s image of a woman with her own arms in the air as she jumps into a pool carved from ice in frozen northeastern China.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it is pure grief and heartbreak, as in Julia Demaree Nikhinson\u2019s close-up of Erika Kirk wiping a tear from her reddened right eye before speaking at a memorial for her husband, slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Or even double heartbreak: a Palestinian woman, gravely injured, holding the body of her infant daughter at Nasser Hospital in the Gaza Strip after an Israeli airstrike \u2014 and the realization that mere weeks later, the photographer herself, Mariam Dagga, would die in another airstrike while covering the same hospital.<\/p>\n
Finally, sometimes it is simply quiet contemplation \u2014 a rarer moment in these jumbled days \u2014 as seen through the lens of Jenny Kane, who captured the silhouette of a lone man walking on the beach near a rock jutting from shore at the edge of the land in Oregon.<\/p>\n
Whatever the subject, whatever the memorable trait, one thing is constant. In every single image, AP photographers carefully calibrated their equipment \u2014 both creative and mechanical \u2014 to bring the world glimpses of itself that resist forgetting.<\/p>\n
And after a confusing year crammed with history and heartbreak, when only the images remain for most of us, that photographic act \u2014 carving grooves of collective memory with color and light and verve and creativity \u2014 may be one of the most important contributions of all.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Photo editing by Benjamin Snyder, Enric Mart\u00ed, and Jacqueline Larma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Years come and go, sometimes before we even realize that time has passed. Events blur and run together.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-163715","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}