PHOTOS OF THE YEAR: Through photographers' lenses, an epic catalog of humanity in 2024 emerges

In nearly 100 countries and all 50 U.S. states, visual journalists with The Associated Press are eyewitnesses to the world’s news, and have won 36 of AP's 59 Pulitzer Prizes since the award was established in 1917.

AP photographers assembled a visual catalog of our civilization as life in 2024 hurtled directly at us at every speed and in every imaginable color and flavor — dizzying, unremitting, challenging the human race to make sense of it. And behind it all, the unspoken questions:

How do you stop time? How do you preserve moments? Amid all the quick cuts that cut to the quick, how do you absorb what needs to be seen and remembered?

The answer is encapsulated — as it has been for nearly two centuries now — in one word that contains multitudes and possibilities: photography.

This year, AP photographers across the world captured 2024’s vast catalogue of events, from breaking news (wars, natural disasters, an assassination attempt) to intimate moments both quiet and exuberant.

Thanks to photographers and their cameras, we were able to look down from the air. We crawled on the ground and looked up at events unfolding. We swam in the ocean. We gazed from a distance and got in front of fascinating faces. We looked straight on.

We stared at the news from oblique angles. We saw landscapes of violence and of inspiration, and we saw intimate detail that only a modern digital camera with a talented human being behind it can deliver.

We saw how people across the planet elected each other, loved each other, broke bread with each other, competed against each other in the most prestigious of forums. We saw them pray for — and with — each other, kill each other, mourn each other.

Through photographers’ lenses, from the widest of...