BY JOSEPH KAHN, EXECUTIVE EDITOR
The images from the earliest moments of the Ukraine conflict revealed sheer terror and disbelief. War had reached a major European capital, Kyiv, and its immediate outskirts. Refugees shoved their way onto a train headed west, pushing past a woman who shut her eyes and screamed.
A woman and her two children lay dead on a roadside, felled by a blast that narrowly missed our photographer, Lynsey Addario. The first photo we published of a dead Russian soldier in Kharkiv, a day after the conflict began, shows the corpse covered by a fresh dusting of snow.
Every year, starting in early fall, photo editors at The New York Times begin sifting through the year’s work in an effort to pick out the most startling, most moving, most memorable pictures. Recently, every year seems like a history-making year: a pandemic that killed millions; an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol; and, in 2022, a war with frightening echoes of the 20th century’s devastating world wars.
Although the war in Ukraine wasn’t this year’s only story, it was the most dominant — photographers for The Times filed some 16,000 images, often in circumstances that endangered their lives.
After the shock of the invasion, the photos began to change. Lynsey, Tyler Hicks and David Guttenfelder, fellow veterans of conflict coverage, told us that the destruction of an artillery war produces too many similar scenes. They began seeking something different.
As the war ground on, they captured a new mood in facial expressions: resignation, but also resilience. A Ukrainian soldier, on leave from the front, lightly held his girlfriend as he placed a soft kiss on her forehead. In the village of Demydiv, someone carrying a bag waded alone down a street that had become a river, flooded by Ukrainians themselves to thwart the Russian advance.
By April, it had become a war of attrition. Even big battles and major advances proved indecisive, with both sides digging in for an extended conflict.
Looking at these images from 2022, it’s impossible not to see fragments of a different kind of war, one being waged here in the United States, with mass shootings taking lives seemingly every week. Sometimes, the most powerful image is of an object that reveals that pain and tragedy, like Tamir Kalifa’s photograph of a bullet-riddled notebook retrieved from a classroom in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were killed. The notebook belonged to one of those children — Uziyah Garcia, a 10-year-old.
There was also change on the social and political fronts. Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, a moment caught in a magical photograph of Leila Jackson gazing at her mother in loving admiration. It was taken by Sarahbeth Maney, who is also a young woman of color.
A gorgeous and powerful black-and-white photo of a pregnant woman in Ohio who had made the difficult decision to have a reduction — the termination of one severely unhealthy fetus to save the life of its healthy sibling — spoke to the anguish.
Hers was one of the last such procedures legal under Ohio’s changing law.
But 2022 undoubtedly belongs to the war in Ukraine, a conflict now settling into a worryingly predictable rhythm. Finbarr O’Reilly’s image of an explosion on Kyiv’s skyline, as Russia retaliated against Ukrainian advances with missile attacks on civilian targets, shows the war as raw and low-tech, because it is. Dumb bombs and artillery blow up buildings for the sole purpose of scaring people.
And yet moments of optimism and joy do arrive. A photo by Laetitia Vancon delights us with the sight of elegantly dressed teenagers dancing on a street in Odesa. We see what they have lost because of Vladimir Putin’s aggression against their country — but also what they refuse to lose.
With this collection, we recognize our photographers for their outstanding work around the world, and hope you will understand more about their thinking and their day-to-day processes as they explain, in their own words, how they got the story.
JANUARY
Elliot Ross joined Wendy Marcum as she did her grocery shopping for the coming weeks.
“As we were walking the final blocks to her temporary home, this sodden, shivering pregnant dog appeared and went up to Wendy under the glow of a streetlight. Instinctively, she dropped the groceries to the pavement and took this sad, smelly creature into her arms and into the house. I was struck by the parallels between Wendy and the dog — two creatures in need of home and heart.”
“When you’re standing on the ground, you can’t visualize the scope of the destruction. So pulling back a little and being able to see the scale of it and seeing the whole neighborhood with the curves of the streets, you can see how the whole neighborhood had been laid out.”
— ERIN SCHAFF
FEBRUARY
Lynsey Addario arrived in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 14, shortly before the invasion began.
“We went to the site where the building had been attacked that morning. There was a woman who basically just kind of came out to start surveying her house. You need some human interaction when you make these photographs. You have to show the scale, the effect and what’s left behind in people’s lives. That’s the challenge with covering war. This war is an artillery war. We see the same images over and over, and it’s really hard to make anything different.”
Tyler Hicks arrived in Kharkiv, Ukraine, as Russian forces were mounting assaults on the city.
“There was no way to know if you would run into Russian soldiers. I decided to get out of the car and walk to make sure we weren’t going to drive up to any surprises. There was snow on the ground and I wasn’t sure what I was going to find, but I eventually came upon several Russian soldiers who had been killed. I took the photos as quickly as I could because the area where I was working was exposed, and then I got back to cover.”
MARCH
“I was photographing along a civilian evacuation route and was in the actual attack. The shell landed between us. The woman and her two children and the church volunteer were killed. I was just lucky the blast went the other direction and not toward me.”
— LYNSEY ADDARIO
Alexander Chekmenev went to Kyiv, Ukraine, a week after the invasion to take portraits of residents who remained.
“To me, everyone who stayed and was ready to meet the invaders was a hero. They were actors, doctors, pensioners and students, and practically all became volunteers. It was important to show the war through a particular person, so that each of us could look into their eyes and see ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves whether we would have been able to act as they did.”