Women Photograph: 2025 Year in Pictures Features Tracy Barbutes Upside-down flag on El Capitan

 Via Women Photograph

December 15, 2025

Women Photograph is proud to share our 2025 Year in Pictures — a collection of images that once again shows us a world on the brink of political turmoil, climate crisis, and an extensive range of human-made disasters. This year’s annual retrospective takes us from Malaysia to South Sudan to Peru, from the ongoing immigration raids happening across the U.S. to efforts to control the spread of malaria in Uganda. As our planet continued to emerge from the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and wars raged on in Ukraine and Congo, we also were buoyed by images of birth, family, celebration, and connection. This year’s Year in Pictures was curated by Women Photograph board member and former National Geographic magazine editor Elizabeth Krist — you can pre-order the 2025 Women Photograph Annual here, and donate to Women Photograph here to support our ongoing work to diversify the visual media industry.

TRACY BARBUTES

A fired park ranger and friends hang an upside-down American flag from El Capitan (Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La), a granite monolith in Yosemite National Park, Calif., on February 22, 2025. This act of protest against the thousands of federal job cuts by the current administration coincided with the “firefall” event, which draws thousands of spectators and photographers annually.

The image went viral and ignited protests on public lands throughout the United States. I stood under El Cap—something I’d done hundreds of times—and as I documented the unfurling of that upside down flag, an act signaling distress, I couldn’t help but observe that we were gathered on colonized Indigenous land.

TIME Top 100 Photos of 2025; includes photo by Mark Peterson

 Via TIME

November 25, 2025

We stand at scenic overlooks and lift our lens to capture a post card view that, of course, looks better on a postcard. It’s not about gear, or the 10,000 hours. It’s simply that almost any photograph is improved by having people in it—a lesson TIME’s Top 100 Photographs of 2025 underscores in images that capture not only a year, but also the faint but discernable shadow cast by a less human future.

The moments photojournalists document tend to be most visible on faces: the panic of a fallen runner about to be spiked, the anguish in an immigrant in a headlock, a smiling Buddha toppled in a quake. Robots (in a footrace, at a bedside) serve as comic relief partly because they have no faces. But, as machines, they carry the same ambiguous edge as artificial intelligence. In Ahmedabad, the tail section of an Air India flight juts from a building like a paper airplane that sailed in and stuck. And in Portland, Ore., sworn agents of the United States government all but disappear inside red smoke, body armor and gas masks. — Karl Vick

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani talks to the press and meets with supporters at a park in Midtown Manhattan, on Oct. 28. Mark Peterson—Redux

Through the Lens 2024: Gabriela Campos

 Via The Santa Fe New Mexican

December 28, 2024

David Manzanares, Ghost Ranch field producer, looks out upon the expansive landscape over Abiquiu as a storm rolled in on Friday Mar. 8, 2024. Manzanares recollected on speaking with a location supervisor who contacted him back in October 2021 to pick his brain about potential spots for the film that would become Oppenheimer. This overlook was one of the selling points for the film crew to choose Abiquiu for filming.

Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican

A look at a few of staff photographer Gabriela Campos' favorite moments from 2024. 

(click for more photos)

Percy Edwards, from the Colville Confederated Tribe in Washington state, stands for a portrait before dancing at the Gathering of Nations at Tingley Coliseum at Expo New Mexico in Albuquerque, N.M. in April.

Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican

Jaime Gonzalez carries a large wooden cross down N.M. 503 for the annual Good Friday pilgrimage to the Santuario de Chimayo.

Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican

TIME's Top 10 Photos of 2022 includes David Butow's Image of a makeshift memorial in downtown Uvalde

 Via TIME

December 22, 2022

On May 24, 19 students and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. The next day, as the nation attempted to understand yet another tragedy, photographer David Butow traveled from his home in Los Angeles to document the aftermath. “I spent most of my childhood in Texas,” says Butow. “I have affection for the place, but in recent years have watched with dismay how the state government has trumpeted an aggressive pro-gun attitude, and I felt that made this event particularly tragic and ironic.”

Residents and media gathered at a local park in close proximity to the school. Butow found himself there along with a group of children and parents visiting the makeshift memorials. “I looked around my camera’s viewfinder at all those faces going through various expressions of pain and grief,” he says. “It was very, very raw and painful to watch, but it was real and it was happening right in front of me so I stayed in place for a few minutes taking dozens of pictures.”

Butow says he has mixed feelings about recording these children’s emotions in such a direct way, but he believes it is critical for the public to see the impact of the shooting. “It makes me sad and angry that Uvalde’s children suffered because of the selfishness and failures of many adults in this country who should be looking after them.”

Full article with all 10 photographs

Stephen Wilkes' Day To Night Photograph One Of National Geographic's "10 unforgettable images from Year in Pictures issue"

 

Via National Geographic

December 8, 2020

After all the tumult of 2020—an extraordinary year that brought a deadly pandemic, political turmoil, racial reckonings, and record-breaking wildfires—it’s fitting that National Geographic is publishing its first-ever Year in Pictures issue

Commitment March: Get Your Knee Off My Neck, Washington, DC, Day to Night, August, 2020

Fifty-seven years to the day after Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, another march drew thousands of people to Washington, D.C., to protest police brutality and racial injustice. To capture this scene, Stephen Wilkes photographed from a single fixed camera position on an elevated crane, making images at intervals throughout a 16-hour period. He then edited the best moments and blended them seamlessly into one image.

“This is Stephen bringing his unique way of capturing time to one of the seminal moments of the summer,” Moran says. “The beauty of it as you look through this photograph, not only do you get that sense of movement across that day but on all those different screens you see the main characters, including Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King’s granddaughter, who were critical to the day’s success.”