Photos of the Year: 12 of the Most Striking Images of 2024

From a stunning photo of a surfer in Tahiti to an iconic photo of US President-elect Donald Trump taken after an assassination attempt, here are 12 of the most eye-catching images from the past year.

A plane passes through a total solar eclipse over Bloomington, Indiana, on April 8 — its extended trails silhouetted against a shimmering crown.

This is of course not the first time that the trajectories of a plane, the moon, the sun and the Earth have crossed.

In January 1925, a U.S. Navy airship, the USS Los Angeles, was loaded with 500 pounds (227 kg) of telescopes and the minds of seven scientists to closely observe a much-anticipated solar eclipse whose path passed directly through the sky. over New York, making it, some say, the most widely observed eclipse in history.

Not on board, but watching intently from his easel on Earth, was American painter Howard Russell Butler, who captured the event as the third panel in a triptych of stunning eclipses (1918, 1923 and 1925) that he hoped to inspire schoolchildren.

Knowing art history can save you considerable stress and heartache.

That, at least, was one of the lessons learned from the controversy surrounding a photo of a decadent painting taken during the Olympics opening ceremony.

The image, which features an exaggeratedly staged table with a nude figure reclining decadently on a platter, surrounded by drag queens and a seductive singer seated in a fruit bowl, has been taken as a satire of The Last Supper by some Christian and conservative critics, who condemned the work, considering it indecent, even sacrilegious.

Apologizing for the confusion, the Paris 2024 organizing committee clarified that the painting was not at all intended to recall Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, but rather to invoke the Greek god Dionysus, evoking the outlines of a later painting by Jan van Bijlert, The Feast of the Gods (1635).

Sudanese refugees wait for their turn to receive aid in a crowded queue at the Renk transit center, South Sudan, in February.

Earlier this year, more than half a million people fled fighting between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces… The joyful fluidity of the colorful fabrics and the rhythm of the rich patterns contrast sharply with the sobriety of the situation of migrants.

The intensity of the photo recalls the rhythm and texture of the abstract works of renowned Sudanese artist and filmmaker Hussein Shariffe, whose poetic paintings blurred the line between the colors we see and those we feel.

Images of Indonesia’s powerful volcano Mount Ruang, which erupted several times in April, spewing hot lava and columns of smoldering ash into the sky, were as fascinating as they were menacing.

The fearsome force of volcanic activity has fascinated image-makers for millennia, and a photo of the sublime eruption of incandescent tephra, vaporized pumice, and molten ore in the atmosphere was eerily in keeping with the violent vision of British romantic artist John Martin.

Two centuries ago, he reimagined the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 for his apocalyptic painting The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822).

Some photos choreograph themselves, aware of their own enduring iconicity.

The raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima, for example, or the raising of fists in a sign of Black Power by American athletes during the medal ceremony at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico, come to mind .

Evoking elements of both image-making milestones, the photo of a defiant Donald Trump, raising his fist, rising to his feet with his face covered in blood after a would-be assassin pierced his right ear with a ball, at a campaign rally in July, while a lopsided Stars and Stripes leans behind him, made many wonder if this was the moment he won the election.

Two Palestinian girls, preparing for Ramadan, light lanterns to decorate crowded refugee tents in southern Gaza, February 29.

The soft light of the lanterns contrasts sharply with the eerie glow of an uncertain sunset flickering in the distance. From this period until the summer, 90% of Gazans (around two million people) will have been displaced by the war.

The enchanting act of lighting lanterns echoes a famous scene in art history – John Singer Sargent’s charming portrait of his friend’s daughters in a twilight garden in southwest England, Carnation , Lily, Lily, Rose, painted patiently over a period of months when the light was just perfect for a few fleeting moments each evening in the fall of 1885.

All that’s missing is green grass and wildflowers, and a lasting sense of peace.

The inspiring image of Brazil’s Gabriel Medina rising to the sky after riding a huge wave off the Polynesian island of Tahiti during the third round of the men’s surfing heats on July 29 instantly went viral.

Medina’s seemingly effortless levitation recalls countless religious depictions of mystical ascension in Western art, from Giotto to Rembrandt, from Il Garofalo to Salvador Dalí.

What seals the surprising synchronicity of athletic elevation with spiritual ascension is Medina’s raised right arm and the cool thrust of his index finger, pointing precisely where his body and soul seem to be headed.

A resident of Valencia, Spain, looks out from her balcony on October 30 at the flooded neighborhood below, as washed-out vehicles crash into each other like a stampede of iron bulls surging through the streets.

A weather phenomenon known as DANA (Depresión Aislada de Niveles Altos), or “cold drop”, hit Valencia a day earlier, triggering unprecedented rain.

In just eight hours, 500 mm (20 inches) fell, devastating the region.

The dizzying perspective of the Valencian woman, through whose eyes we see the world bend and twist, recalls the crumpled perspective of Italian cubist Carlo Carra’s 1912 painting, Simultaneity, The woman on the balcony.

During a listening party for the release of his album Hit Me Hard and Soft in New York in May, American singer Billie Eilish appears to dissolve into a dream of hazy light as her body is both amplified and vaporized into an imposing, if intangible, silhouette.

The dissolution of self into a resplendent mist recalls the evaporating visions of British painter JMW Turner, whose complex painting Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge (1843), imagines a seemingly unfathomable moment of sublime illumination, which sets the stage for every shimmering nuance of existence that follows.

In a gesture of deep contempt, a group of people trample the head of a toppled statue of former President Hafez al-Assad on December 9 in Syria.

After the collapse of Syria’s Baath regime and the flight of the Assad family from the country, Syrians were seen destroying countless effigies of deposed President Bashar al-Assad’s father in cities across the country.

There is, of course, a kind of collective catharsis in the shared jubilation of destroying statues of rejected leaders, as we see in William Walcutt’s 1857 painting of a circle of ecstatic New Yorkers tearing down the statue of the king George III by the British sculptor Joseph Wilton in July 1776, following a fiery reading of the newly adopted Declaration of Independence.

In April, more than 350 dancers came together to set the Guinness World Record for the most ballerinas posing simultaneously en pointe.

A photo of many participants excitedly preparing for the competition captured the elegance and energy of this memorable event.

The claustrophobic crowd of so many young women would no doubt have pleased the French impressionist artist Edgar Degas, who, it seems, was not content to simply enjoy the sight of the skilled dancers, whom he called his “little monkeys “, practicing and performing, but also the agonizing sound of their joints “creaking”. “Perhaps I too often,” he admitted to the painter Pierre-Georges Jeanniot, “considered women like an animal.”

A South Korean woman fearlessly grabs the barrel of a soldier’s loaded rifle.

Captured shortly after President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, the image shows Ahn Gwi-ryeong, 35, a spokesperson for the opposition Democratic Party, struggling with heavily armed soldiers, who had been ordered to prevent deputies from gathering.

“My only thought,” Ahn later said of the confrontation, “was that I just had to stop them. I pushed them back, shook them, and did everything I could.”

Ahn’s steely determination and even the shimmer of metallic light on her clothing recall the moving watercolor portrait of Joan of Arc by British artist John Gilbert in the 19th century.

*The numbers mentioned in this article do not represent a ranking. They are intended to make entries as clear as possible.