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Umbrella-wielding protesters engulfed in tear gas in Hong Kong. A severely malnourished baby girl sprawled on a floor in Venezuela. The first-ever image of a black hole.
These are some of the pictures in the seemingly boundless photographic universe that Times editors scrolled through to define the year visually.
At The Times, the Year in Pictures is the result of weeks of near round-the-clock culling and editing. And 2019 marks the most ambitious year yet for the project, led by David Furst, the International photo editor, and Jeffrey Henson Scales, the Op-Ed photo editor. (Mr. Furst and Mr. Henson Scales also oversee the Decade in Photos, which will publish on Dec. 19.)
For the first time since 2008, the project will have its own special section in the paper, on Dec. 15, featuring an introduction by Dean Baquet, The Times’s executive editor. At 36 pages, it has almost twice the print real estate that it did last year, when it ran as part of the Sunday Review.
Beyond expanding the project’s scale, Mr. Furst wanted to “bring the photographers out from behind their bylines” this year. To that end, Dionne Searcey, a political reporter who recently returned to New York after being The Times’s West Africa bureau chief, interviewed about 50 of the photographers. Their quotes and anecdotes — about covering an Ebola outbreak, being in the center of violent protests, working in arctic temperatures — help explain what goes into their thinking before they press the shutter button.
“They put you in the photographer’s spot,” said Umi Syam, a graphics and multimedia editor who designed the project’s digital presentation. “Just imagining the situation when it happened is really powerful.”
To be as comprehensive as possible, Mr. Furst reached out to every desk in the newsroom and The New York Times Magazine, as well as to photo agencies and wire services, for their best material. He and Mr. Henson Scales also kept a spreadsheet of hundreds of individual photographers, painstakingly reviewing their published and unpublished work from The Times and other assignments, and came up with a list of the most important news events to include.
Doug Mills, a Times photographer who covers the White House, has shot more than 12,000 pictures since January alone, making the task of narrowing those down to 100 initially, and later to just two, a herculean challenge.
“We want it to be definitive,” Mr. Furst said.
All told, the editors went through over 500,000 photos.
Mr. Furst described the initial stage as daunting: “When you feel like you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you’re reminded that you missed a dozen different news events or these 20 photographers or these 15 projects in the newsroom.”
They pared down the photos and organized them in folders by month. Hundreds of images for each month were narrowed down to dozens and, eventually, to about 10.
The final phase of cutting was grueling. Mr. Furst and Mr. Henson Scales scrutinized photos side by side as they went through each month and then looked at the year as a whole.
“One of the big balances is news value versus craftsmanship and beauty,” Mr. Henson Scales said. “We’re always having to juggle those kinds of elements.”
Getting just the right mix of images was the most challenging part. The editors considered a number of factors, such as the impact of a photo or its ability to delight, and the variety of images in each month. A beautiful, poignant picture could edge out a more newsworthy one, and vice versa.
In the print special section, which features fewer photos than the digital version and a layout that intersperses images of different sizes, the pictures had to work well with others on the page.
The designers avoided jarring juxtapositions, finding ways to balance moments of tragedy and levity. Portraits, landscapes and aerial shots sit comfortably alongside hard news photos. “It’s like a Rubik’s cube,” said Mary Jane Callister, an art director who designed the section.
One photographer who came up repeatedly in discussions of the digital and print presentations was Lam Yik Fei, a photojournalist who has covered the protests in Hong Kong for The Times. His striking image of a police officer standing in front of an exploding firebomb wraps around the print section, and other photos he took, including portraits of the protesters, are featured throughout the project.
“We are always interested in finding images that really represent a particular photographer’s unique way of seeing something,” said Meaghan Looram, The Times’s director of photography, who compiled the Year in Pictures for 10 years with Mr. Henson Scales and now reviews the project as it comes together.
She thinks the coverage by Mr. Lam, who was born and raised in Hong Kong, has been especially notable because he knows the setting and the situation so well.
“He has exceptional access and has been in all the right places at all the right times,” Ms. Looram said. “It’s very dramatic, but also he’s really attempting to show all facets of the story.”
While most of the featured photographers are seasoned professionals, there are some fresher faces, too. The month of June includes an image from the Pride Parade in New York by Brittainy Newman, a photography fellow at The Times who shot the event for her first big project. She graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology last year and often drew inspiration from the Year in Pictures as a student.
When she found out she would be among this year’s photographers, “I almost cried,” she said. “It’s really a dream come true.”
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December 11, 2019 at 05:00PM
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From 500,000 Photos to 116: How Our Editors Distill the Year in Pictures - The New York Times
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