December 21, 2023
A girl who, unable to get an abortion, becomes a mother before starting 7th grade; a mass of twisted metal and ash, all that remains of a home in the wake of the Maui wildfires; Bad Bunny, one of the year’s most engaging entertainers, stepping out in a pink mohair coat adorned with a bow: These photographs, all featured in TIME during 2023, constitute a map of where we’ve been and what we’ve seen, connecting us with the greater world. Sometimes we may feel we live and work in isolation, but it’s never true: there are always those facing challenges as formidable as our own, or even more so, and there are joys to be had, too. These are just a few of the gifts great photographs can bring us, a collapsing of the distance between others and ourselves.
We’re reminded how our world is changing around us when we see a flutter of birds over Delhi, a city cloaked with smog that puts both animal health and that of humans at risk. A 14-year-old Georgia teenager named Malayah faces the camera resolutely, a reminder that paying attention to the mental health of young people will make for happier, more well-adjusted grownups tomorrow—the world will be in their hands someday. And a group of citizens light candles for Tyre Nichols, beaten and killed by Memphis police in January, at the community skate park he used to frequent as a youth in Sacramento, Calif. We need to remember our dead, especially those whose deaths fill us with anger—but it’s also important to recall the things that brought joy to their lives, because even for those whose lives aren’t cut down prematurely, time is fleeting.
David Butow: Ruins of a home in the small hillside town of Kula. "What Remains After the Flames: Scenes From the Ash-Colored Streets of Maui," September 4 issue.
David Butow's photograph "The landscape of destruction, Lahaina, Maui, seen on August 24, 2023" is featured in the current exhibition "This Fragile Earth", on view through January 21, 2024
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