2023: The Year in Pictures
A Weary World
By Marc Lacey
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/world/year-in-pictures.html
#TheYearinPictures #TheNewYorkTimes #2023inPhotos #newyorktimes
This past year saw plenty of suffering before the morning of Oct. 7.
The war in Ukraine continued to rage. A wildfire tore through a historic town in Hawaii, and the earth shook violently in Turkey. Mass shootings took life after life.
Then, on Oct. 7, Hamas gunmen stormed across the border of Gaza into Israel. And Israel struck back with force across Gaza. The suffering across the world seemed as if it would never end.
Every year, our photo editors try to capture the best photojournalism in one intense presentation. The Year in Pictures is a way to commemorate the big news events from January to December: the ones that traumatized us — and there are many of those — mixed in with some moments of bliss.
In that bliss category, take one young girl’s 13th birthday celebration, which featured a squealing, rapturous night of music and dance with Taylor Swift. An image of the girl, Gabbi Jones, decked out as a Swiftie before a big show in Southern California, shows her beaming behind braces, as though all is well in the world.
We, of course, know otherwise. Another young Swiftie was photographed as she sang and danced — while alone at the grave of one of the friends she lost last year in a mass shooting at her elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Years are like that: Awfulness can be jumbled together with ecstasy in impossible-to-reconcile ways. So 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.
So many children, sadly, will not see 2024, never mind the concert of their dreams. Their lives ended when their homes and classrooms turned into battlefields or disaster zones.
There’s a haunting image from Gaza, taken by Samar Abu Elouf, that shows the corpse of a Palestinian baby named Misk wrapped in white cloth outside a morgue. She lies alongside relatives who were killed in an Israeli strike on Gaza. The girl’s bloodied face is visible. Her surviving brother is beside himself, as despondent as a grief-stricken woman in another photograph by Ms. Abu Elouf: That woman is pictured mourning over a relative in a body bag.
The images gathered here, a tribute to the brave photographers who scrambled into harm’s way to capture them, remind us that there were so many tears in 2023.
There’s an unforgettable image of a boy with his tiny hands over his eyes in the basement of his home in Kyiv, Ukraine, where he and his mother sought shelter after an air raid alarm sounded.
Another small hand is pressed up to a window of a school bus in Nashville as a distraught child departs the Covenant School, where a gunman had just mowed down three of her classmates.
Some of what counts for joy this year is rooted in darkness.
There’s a powerful photograph by Tamir Kalifa of an Israeli family clustered together in anguish while awaiting word on the fate of two siblings taken hostage by Hamas on that day in October. The expressions are soul-stirring.
And then there’s a follow-up image toward the end of this package, taken after a brief cease-fire took hold in the region: the young hostages, freed from captivity and on their way home, their lives still ahead of them.
