Some of the most haunting images are of emptiness. The scenes of people comforting beloved family members through glass and cellphones are heartbreaking. Then the virus swept the world, recorded in indelible images. The other looks like a still from a sci-fi film: A man dressed in black, wearing a white mask, lies dead on a city street two emergency workers have stepped away from him and gaze at the viewer - all but their eyes hidden by face coverings and ghostly white protective suits. In one aerial shot, construction workers are building a giant hospital virtually overnight to handle hundreds of patients stricken with the coronavirus. But two pictures taken in late January in Wuhan, China, are hints of a larger cataclysm to come. The impeachment of an American president culminated in early 2020.
Jeffrey Henson Scales, who edited The Year in Pictures with David Furst, said he had never felt such sweep and emotion from a single year’s images - from the “joy and optimism” of a New Year’s Eve kiss in Times Square, to angry crowds on the streets of Hong Kong and in American cities, to scenes of painful debates over race and policing, to the “seemingly countless graves and coffins across the globe.” The photographs in this collection capture those historic 12 months. It will long be remembered and studied as a time when more than 1.5 million people globally died during a pandemic, racial unrest gripped the world, and democracy itself faced extraordinary tests. The year 2020 will certainly join this list.
Certain years are so eventful they are regarded as pivotal in history, years when wars and slavery ended and deep generational fissures burst into the open - 1865, 19 among them.