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      Thousands of Photographs, and a Year Like No Other

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Latest Vaccine InformationVaccine TrackerFAQAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTimes InsiderThousands of Photographs, and a Year Like No OtherThe Year in Pictures project is an annual celebration of photojournalism. In 2020, photographers were living what they captured.Eliana Marcela Rendon and her husband, Edilson Valencia, witnessed Ms. Rendon’s grandmother, Carmen Evelia Toro, die from COVID-19 at North Shore University Hospital in New York.Credit…Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesDec. 12, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETTimes Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The first photo that appears in The Year in Pictures, The New York Times’s annual celebration and review of photography, was taken on Jan 1. Just seconds into 2020, in the heart of Times Square, the photographer Calla Kessler captured what was likely the first New Year’s photo of a same-sex couple kissing to be printed on the front page of The Times.Nearly every editor and writer who worked on The Year in Pictures had the same reaction to the celebratory scene in the frame: “These people had no idea what was coming.”Julian Sanders and Jay Morales, center, started off 2020 with a New Year’s kiss in Times Square.Credit…Calla Kessler/The New York TimesWe had no idea what was coming.The year began with a mysterious respiratory ailment in Wuhan, China, and President Trump’s impeachment trial. Late in the spring, the death of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests and civil unrest gripped the nation. Wildfires and hurricanes devastated parts of the United States. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and Amy Coney Barrett joined the Supreme Court. Joseph R. Biden Jr. became the first candidate to defeat an incumbent president in an election since 1992, and Kamala Harris is the first woman elected to serve as vice president. Along the way, Kobe Bryant and John Lewis died. The coronavirus continues unabated in the United States.“I don’t think there’s been a bigger news year since 1968,” Dean Baquet, The Times’s executive editor, said in a planning meeting.The Year in Pictures was published online this week and appears in Sunday’s newspaper. Even in an ordinary year, the project is a huge undertaking that calls on talent from across the newsroom. Dozens of printed proofs would have lined the floors and walls in the office while a group of designers and editors hovered, moving photos and pages around.With the majority of the newsroom working remotely this year, however, designers and editors debated these details over videocalls, squinting at layouts on screens and 8.5-by-11-inch pages from household printers.“Sometimes our sessions were three hours long,” said Mary Jane Callister, an art director, who designed the print section with her design colleague Carrie Mifsud. “It was a real challenge to tell the story in 36 pages,” she said.The Year in Pictures was published this week and appears in newspapers on Sunday.Credit…The New York TimesPerhaps no two people were as close to this Year in Pictures than Jeffrey Henson Scales and David Furst, the lead photo editors of the Opinion and the International desks, respectively. In recent months, Mr. Furst and Mr. Henson Scales, who helped lead the project, reviewed around half a million published and unpublished photographs. (By Nov. 1, Mr. Henson Scales had reviewed at least 16,410 photographs by Doug Mills, a staff photographer in the Washington bureau, alone.)“The areas that The Times covered, it covered them really strongly,” Mr. Henson Scales said. On an average day, Times photographers file 1,000 to 1,500 photographs.“I don’t know that I have ever come across a body of work that’s as complicated as this one,” Mr. Furst said.Protesters marched against racism in cities and towns around the country after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.Credit…Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesIn addition to an introduction written by Mr. Baquet, the project includes pictures woven with firsthand accounts from photographers, who provide behind-the-camera context. That feature was first used in 2019. This year, it was especially important to read what went into the work, Mr. Furst said. There are always photographers around the world living the story they cover — under oppressive governments, or in residential neighborhoods that turn into battlefields of war — but in 2020, everyone lived it.Readers hear from Mr. Mills, who worried about taking the virus from White House events home to his family, and Sara Krulwich, a culture photographer for The Times, who had to navigate months with no live performances to shoot. Tyler Hicks spent weeks in the Brazilian Amazon documenting the toll of the virus there.Outside their St. Louis home, Patricia and Mark McCloskey met Black Lives Matters protesters with guns.Credit…Lawrence Bryant/ReutersLawrence Bryant, a photographer for Reuters, shared his experience photographing Patricia and Mark McCloskey, who wielded guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in front of their house in St. Louis.“He talks about his fear of this woman pointing a gun at him and trying to figure out where he could be safe from that,” Mr. Henson Scales said.When asked what he wants readers to feel, Mr. Henson Scales responded: “It was a long year, filled with heroics. And thus far, we’ve made it through. Be glad of that.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Looking back at 2020: a year like no other – podcast

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      A look back at how the Guardian covered a year that began with the outbreak of a pandemic, witnessed global anti-racism protests after the killing of George Floyd, and ended with the voting out of President Donald Trump

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      As we entered a new decade back in January, newspapers were full of stories about Australian bushfires, tensions between the US and Iran, and the British Conservatives were revelling in their 80-seat majority. But the World Health Organization was already dealing with news of a ‘novel coronavirus’ in Wuhan, China, a disease that was going to dramatically change the way we lived our lives. Covid-19 swept through Asia and into Europe and beyond, killing almost 2 million people and bringing the world’s economies to their knees. The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, joins Anushka Asthana to look back on a year in which reporters covered some huge breaking stories, including the killing of George Floyd and the global anti-racism movement Black Lives Matter. There was the US election in which the American people voted to remove Donald Trump. And there was the biggest story of all: the continuing climate crisis which, despite a pandemic-induced reduction in travel, only resulted in a 7% drop in global emissions. And all the while Britain hurtled inexorably towards an end-of-year Brexit. More

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      Minnijean Brown-Trickey: the teenager who needed an armed guard to go to school

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      When Minnijean Brown-Trickey looks back at old pictures of 4 September 1957, she remembers the day her courage kicked in. “I look at the photos of the nine of us, standing there, in contrast to those crazy people,” she says. “And what I say is that they threw away their dignity and it landed on us.”Brown-Trickey, now 79, was one of the Little Rock Nine, the first group of African American children to go to the city’s Central high school in September 1957 – and in doing so, desegregate it. On the teenagers’ first day at the Arkansas school, white residents were so furious they amassed in a 1,000-strong mob at the gates. In preparation, eight of the teenagers had been instructed by Daisy Bates, the leader of the Arkansas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to meet at her house, so they could travel to the school in a group. But one of the nine, Elizabeth Eckford, had no telephone and so was not told of the safety plan. Instead she was forced to run the gauntlet of the mob’s hatred alone. The pictures of the young girl encountering the baying crowd is the enduring image of that day for many. But to Brown-Trickey, despite its power, it cannot completely capture all nine children’s fear. “Still photos cannot show how we are shaking in our boots, sandwiched between the Arkansas National Guard and a mob of crazy white people,” she says.As they tried to walk into school, the children were subject to verbal abuse, spat on and denied admission. Three black journalists watching were also attacked. One, L Alex Wilson, was hit on the head with a brick, developed a nervous condition and died three years later aged only 51.It took a further three weeks for the students to actually step inside the building, thanks to fierce resistance from the Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who used the mob as a pretext for barring the nine, putting the state’s National Guard in their way. Brown-Trickey recalls how he warned of “blood in the streets” should the children be allowed to go to school. More

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      Gary Younge on minority voters and the future of the Republican party – podcast

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      A look at the history of US voting rights and what the changing demographics of the country mean for Republicans

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      Black and Latino voters overwhelmingly favoured the Democrats in the 2020 US election. Without their huge margins in key states, Joe Biden could not have won, the journalist Gary Younge tells Anushka Asthana. By 2045, white voters will be in the minority. These changing demographics are a concern for the Republican party. In 2013, just a year after turnout rates for black voters surpassed those for white voters for the first time, the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which affected poor, young and minority voters. It’s important to remember, Gary tells Anushka, that the US was a slave state for more than 200 years; and an apartheid state, after the abolition of slavery, for another century. It has only been a non-racial democracy for 55 years. And that now hangs in the balance. If Biden does not produce something transformative, the disillusionment among voters may grow and people may once again look for someone who can disrupt the status quo, which is how Donald Trump won in 2016. • Read Gary Younge’s piece: Counted out: Trump’s desperate fight to stop the minority vote More

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      Joe Biden: Black Lives Matter activists helped you win Wisconsin. Don't forget us | Justin Blake

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      Three months ago, a Kenosha police officer shot my nephew, Jacob Blake, seven times in the back in front of his children. Jacob was rushed to the hospital, where for days he was shackled to his bed, only to find he’d been paralyzed from the waist down. The officer who shot him, Rusten Sheskey, has yet to be charged with a crime and is currently on paid administrative leave.Days after the shooting, Donald Trump came and went, showing little empathy for our family, and calling for a violent crackdown on protests for racial justice. The press, too, came and went, as the drama of uprising transitioned into the long, slow work of healing and change. But even after the cameras left, after the president ignored our pain and took off in his motorcade, Kenoshans kept organizing.In close concert with the Blake family, grassroots organizations in Kenosha began turning protest power into electoral power in one of the most competitive swing states in the country. From the start, our goal was to counteract voter suppression and make sure everyone in our community had their voice heard at the ballot box.On 20 October, our family joined hundreds of activists and community members in a peaceful march from Kenosha to Milwaukee, receiving support along the way from luminaries like the former Ohio state senator Nina Turner and the Rev Jesse Jackson. The march took over 14 hours, ending in Milwaukee’s Red Arrow Park, where Dontre Hamilton was killed by a police officer in 2014. The message of the marchers was simple: south-eastern Wisconsin has seen too much violence at the hands of the police. It’s time for Wisconsinites to vote out the politicians who have allowed, and often encouraged, this violence in our communities.Make no mistake: now that Biden’s won the election, he owes this country real racial justice reformFor many of the activists in Kenosha, including Jacob’s family, this meant voting Trump out of office. In the last two weeks before the election, we took this message door to door in a canvassing sprint across Kenosha, a city where the Joe Biden campaign itself had very little presence on the ground. But for the thousands of low-propensity voters we spoke to one-on-one in the city of Kenosha, Biden’s 20,000 statewide vote margin might have looked a lot smaller.Mainstream Democrats often invoke “loyalty” as the quality they hope to inspire in their voters. But “loyalty” is a two-way street: party leaders shouldn’t expect it if they can’t deliver for the voters who put them in office. And on this front, particularly with Black voters, Biden is far from perfect. He spearheaded the 1994 crime bill, for instance, which expanded mass incarceration and hurt Black communities across the country.Kenosha’s community leaders are taking a chance on Biden, believing that this turning point will push him to learn from past mistakes and take a moral stance in this moment of national division. And we are tired of Trump’s hateful racism and the increasingly explicit imprimatur he’s given to violent white supremacists. But make no mistake: now that Biden’s won the election, he owes this country real racial justice reform.He must start with the most obvious steps: executive orders that address the immediate need for federal remedies to protect Black and Brown citizens from police brutality; appointing a special prosecutor to investigate both criminal and civil rights violations in the Floyd, Taylor, Blake, Cole and Anderson cases. More broadly, Biden must recognize that poverty and racism are pandemics in their own right, each of which has been exacerbated by Covid-19. Beginning to remedy them will require not just an emergency economic stabilization package, but a national moratorium on foreclosures and evictions for the next 12 months, and a prioritization of funding for the communities of color hit hardest by the virus.These demands are not coming from Kenosha alone, but from all across the country, where the Black Lives Matter movement – the largest social uprising in our nation’s history – has inspired a new generation of voters and activists. So while racial justice leaders may have helped Biden take back the White House, come January 2021, we’ll be reminding him exactly who got him there. More

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      James Clyburn: ‘defund the police’ slogan may have hurt Democrats at polls

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      James Clyburn, the House majority whip and Democratic “kingmaker” who played an outsized role in Joe Biden’s successful presidential run, has said the “sloganeering” of the Black Lives Matter protests and other social justice efforts this summer might have hampered them at the polls.Clyburn, a Black South Carolina congressman and prominent figure in the civil rights movement, likened the “defund the police” mantra of certain activists to civil rights efforts in the 1960s, when some public support for the movement’s objectives was eroded by radical messaging.Clyburn invoked memories of John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died this year.“I came out very publicly and very forcibly against sloganeering,” Clyburn said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “John Lewis and I were founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. John and I sat on the House floor and talked about that defund the police slogan, and both of us concluded that it had the possibilities of doing to the Black Lives Matter movement and current movements across the country what Burn, Baby, Burn did to us back in the 1960s,” Clyburn said.Burn, Baby, Burn became a street slogan during the Watts civil unrest of 1965 in Los Angeles, at the time the largest and costliest uprising of the civil rights era.“We lost that movement over that slogan,” he said.He added: “We saw the same thing happening here. We can’t pick up these things just because it makes a good headline. It sometimes destroys headway.”As an example, Clyburn cited the defeat of South Carolina US Senate hopeful Jaime Harrison, who ended up beaten comprehensively by the incumbent Republican Lindsey Graham in a race many had hoped he would win after he turned a longshot campaign into a real contest. “Jaime Harrison started to plateau when ‘defund the police’ showed up with a caption on TV, ran across his head,” Clyburn said in a separate Sunday appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.“That stuff hurt Jaime. And that’s why I spoke out against it a long time ago. I’ve always said that these headlines can kill a political effort.”Clyburn also attacked the Democratic party’s “progressive” left wing, members of which have already broken ranks and fired the first shots in a looming battle for the future political direction of the party.“Sometimes I have real problems trying to figure out what progressive means,” he said.Clyburn’s comments followed a salvo by left-wing rising star Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez who has taken the opposite position, reflecting deep rifts in Biden’s victorious party as it prepares to reoccupy the presidency.In a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, she warned that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose badly in the 2022 midterm elections.The leftwing New York congresswoman sharply rejected the notion that progressive messaging around the summer’s anti-racism protests and more radical policies like the Green New Deal had led to the party’s loss of congressional seats. She said the party needed to play to its core base of supporters, not reach out to centrists, or soft Republicans.“If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organisers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organised Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic party is the John Kasich won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is,” she said.Kasich is a former Republican governor of Ohio who campaigned for Biden, endorsing him as a centrist that moderate Republicans could get behind. More

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      We left the UK for Portland expecting a liberal dream. That wasn’t the reality

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      It was Labor Day. We were having a barbecue in our back garden when gale-force winds started out of nowhere. As we scrambled to hold down plates and glasses, our neighbour’s horse chestnut trees swayed menacingly, their leaves swirling around us.Over the next hour, smoke filled the air and the sky changed from bright blue to dirty grey. We moved everything inside and shut up the house. Soon after, the power went. We had no idea what was happening: rumours started online that protestors – some said Antifa, some said Proud Boys – were starting fires on the outskirts of the city.We soon learned the truth: a “rare wind event” had caused wildfires to spread rapidly across Oregon, including to forests south of Portland. As the week progressed, the fires and smoke intensified and people were evacuated from neighbouring towns. Portlanders now had three reasons to wear a mask: coronavirus, police teargas and deadly smoke.I refreshed local fire maps every 15 minutes, tracking the flames’ path. My husband and I discussed whether we should plan an escape route but we would have been met by smoke from other wildfires in almost any possible direction. Local government advice was to stay put unless an evacuation warning was issued. We held tight. More