Photographs that outlined the 12 months

Years come and go, typically earlier than we even notice that point has handed. Events blur and run collectively. The information is overwhelming, and even those that comply with it carefully can really feel a way of unremitting vertigo. Such is Twenty first-century life on a linked and chaotic planet.

But individuals — individuals stand out, regardless of the place they might be. And moments in time have the facility to freeze the world with the snap of a digital digicam’s shutter, again and again across the planet — from Gaza to Ukraine, the Philippines to Haiti, Maine to the White House to California and so many factors in between.

That’s what The Associated Press’ corps of photographers documented in 2025: the frenzied and the quiet, the bloody and the contemplative, and even wholesome doses of pleasure, surprise and discovery to assist us see that our violent and typically inexplicable world is filled with good issues, too.

In over 200 places globally, photojournalists with the AP are trusted eyewitnesses to information and have received 36 of AP’s Pulitzer Prizes because the award was established in 1917.

They are excess of eyewitnesses, although. They are journalists, explorers, artists, understanders. They are specialists in vantage level and lightweight, in individuals expertise and storytelling.

Sometimes it is the colour: the saturated, indignant oranges in Etienne Laurent’s arresting picture of firefighters in California battling a blaze that had engulfed a beachfront property in Malibu, California.

Sometimes it is the motion and the motion: Robert F. Bukaty’s photograph of the again half of a sturgeon, propelling itself fiercely via the waters of Maine and leaving bubbles in its wake. Or the kinetic vitality that bursts from Aaron Favila’s body of males massing to salvage electrical wire after a fireplace in a poor Philippine neighborhood.

Sometimes it is what photographers name “adverse area”: Petros Giannakouris’ image of the Parthenon and the moon at night, their magnificence dramatically amplified by the midnight-blue sky that fills most of the frame.

Sometimes it is juxtaposition across images and continents: Niranjan Shrestha’s 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 — and its mirror image of joy, Andy Wong’s image of a woman with her own arms in the air as she jumps into a pool carved from ice in frozen northeastern China.

Sometimes it is pure grief and heartbreak, as in Julia Demaree Nikhinson’s 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 — and the realization that mere weeks later, the photographer herself, Mariam Dagga, would die in another airstrike while covering the same hospital.

Finally, sometimes it is simply quiet contemplation — a rarer moment in these jumbled days — 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.

Whatever the subject, whatever the memorable trait, one thing is constant. In every single image, AP photographers carefully calibrated their equipment — both creative and mechanical — to bring the world glimpses of itself that resist forgetting.

And after a confusing year crammed with history and heartbreak, when only the images remain for most of us, that photographic act — carving grooves of collective memory with color and light and verve and creativity — may be one of the most important contributions of all.

Photo modifying by Benjamin Snyder, Enric Martí, and Jacqueline Larma.