The New York Times – “So much of the year’s news played out in the streets. Week after week, protesters poured onto the wide boulevards of Hong Kong, where the photographer Lam Yik Fei seemed to be everywhere. Brexit drew tens of thousands into the streets of London. A subway fare increase was the final spark that led to protests in Santiago, Chile, and people heaved makeshift bombs along a bridge linking Venezuela and Colombia. The tumult of mass gatherings produced some of the year’s most powerful pictures. But a quiet image of two people stood out as perhaps the saddest: Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez lay with his arm limply draped over his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, their lifeless bodies locked together on the banks of the Rio Grande, where they drowned trying to cross from Mexico into the United States.
Every year the photo editors of The New York Times cull through 365 days of photographs in an attempt to recapture and visually distill the year. The result is this collection of images, a visual chronicle of violence, political power struggles, climate catastrophes, mass shootings and a few poignant scenes of everyday life. Some stories were obvious in their photographic power. The wildfires that erupted across California seemed urgent and frightening. Blazes destroyed large parts of the Amazon rainforest. And the entire roof of the 850-year-old Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire, and came perilously close to bringing down the medieval structure. By comparison, Washington’s power struggles mostly eluded the camera. The intrigue that may lead to the impeachment of an American president — the biggest domestic story of this year and probably the next — took place over secret phone calls and behind the closed doors of the Oval Office. Nonetheless, our photographers Doug Mills, Erin Schaff and Damon Winter made subtle and telling images of a process often obscured by political maneuvering and stagecraft…”