A note on NYT’s A Year Like No Other
by Denzel Yorong
Despite not needing a reminder of how I welcomed 2020 — it was my first time having New Year’s overseas — I went on to check my Facebook Memories on the last day of the year: I was on a rooftop with Hongkongers and Filipinos, shivering in the unfamiliar cold of Causeway Bay. Yet looking from the outside, there was nothing out of the ordinary about that party. We cheered, we hugged, we tossed to what could’ve been a great year.
So did these people captured in the opening image of the New York Times’ A Year Like No Other.
Most papers culminate each year with a summary of the world’s most stunning photojournalistic work. More than a visual survey of the year’s biggest news and newsmakers, this annual year in pictures tradition has become the most herculean task for photo editors, drown in visual fatigue as they scramble through thousands of photos.
The year 2020 not only brought a different set of challenges for covering stories: journalism in the time of pandemic is an entirely uncharted terrain for contemporary media. The global health emergency pushed publications to their limits. The result: intimacy restrained in hazmats, nuance lost in Zoom screens.
The New York Times searched for its relics behind the lenses.
Firsthand accounts from photographers came alongside the paper’s 2020 version of year in pictures. While this is not the first time the Times included behind-the-scenes narratives in its annual wrap (the feature was first used in 2019), the edition warrants the need to see from the vantage point of image-makers and immerse in their process of image-making.
A look into how their photographs were made reveals the embattled discipline of today’s storytelling. Photographer Doug Mills, in the May section, shares his fears of contracting coronavirus in his coverage on Trump rallies and the White House despite following minimum health protocols. Hector Retamal and Cenate Sotto, who covered the former epicenter cities of Wuhan and Bergamo respectively, recounted the early months of the pandemic when there was only little that we knew about the virus. Their call of duty: leap into the void.
A huge chunk of the photographer’s job description: a lot of watching and waiting, as in the assignments of Emilio Morenatti and Ryan Christopher Jones. The former, in a promenade in Barcelona, watched as patients breathe in seaside air for the first time after months of intensive care, in the hopes of recovering through immersing them back in the outside world. The latter was tasked to cover last rites for COVID victims in Boston, which means he had to spend most of his hours in his hotel waiting for that dreaded phone call that would signal somewhere near, someone was dying from the disease.
Then there were those who didn’t have to wait. The story came to Hussein Mala in a literal blast— he was only three miles away from the Beirut explosion. Amid lockdown in São Paulo, protesters came to their windows in response to the Brazilian government’s downplaying of the pandemic. Victor Moriyama photographed from outside their building.
Of course, that was only one of the many protests the world witnessed in 2020 — from Hong Kong’s year-opening mass demonstrations to America’s Black Lives Matter movement to Bangkok’s anti-government protests. Photographers ended the year — the decade — with the most poignant images.
To call it a year of reckoning, indeed, for journalism is to commit to an overdue retrospection, not only in our deeply held standards of professed objective truth but on the frailties of our democratic institutions.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that jailed journalists rise in record numbers in 2020. Murders even doubled, with Mexico, Afghanistan, and the Philippines having the most retaliatory killings. In Manila, Rappler editor and chief executive Maria Ressa, who’s faced a number of investigations for her news site’s critical reporting, was convicted of cyberlibel charges — an anti-press maneuver of the country’s growing autocracy.
This is the cautionary tale that the Times’ A Year Like No Other, however definitive, missed to tell. Far beyond the perils of the pandemic and political unrest lies the global, orchestrated assault on the free press.
It’s a year like no other because of a crisis, not in our public health systems, but in our infrastructure of truth — it has always been fragile and 2020 came to do the final blow.
While we expected this whole crisis to undermine the rigors of journalism, on an optimistic note, truth-seeking and truth-telling prove to prevail.
A Year Like No Other | Introduction by Dean Baquet, executive editor of NYT | Curated by David Furst and Jeffrey Henson Scales
Also see: Year in Pictures of The Washington Post, CNN, Al Jazeera, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and Time.
