The top 100 photos of 2025 from The Associated Press: Images that defined the year

Years come and go, sometimes before we even realize that time has passed. Events blur and run together. The news is overwhelming, and even those who follow it closely can feel a sense of unremitting vertigo. Such is 21st-century life on a connected and chaotic planet.

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EDITOR’S NOTE – This gallery contains some graphic images.

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But people – people stand out, no matter where they may be. And moments in time have the power to freeze the world with the snap of a digital camera’s shutter, over and over around the planet – from Gaza to Ukraine, the Philippines to Haiti, Maine to the White House to California and so many points in between.

That’s what The Associated Press’ corps of photographers documented in 2025: the frenzied and the quiet, the bloody and the contemplative, and even healthy doses of joy, wonder and discovery to help us see that our violent and sometimes inexplicable world is full of good things, too.

In over 200 locations globally, photojournalists with the AP are trusted eyewitnesses to news and have won 36 of AP’s Pulitzer Prizes since the award was established in 1917.

They are far more than eyewitnesses, though. They are journalists, explorers, artists, understanders. They are experts in vantage point and light, in people skills and storytelling.

Sometimes it’s the color: the saturated, angry oranges in Etienne Laurent’s arresting image of firefighters in California battling a blaze that had engulfed a beachfront property in Malibu, California.

Sometimes it’s the action and the movement: Robert F. Bukaty’s photo of the back half of a sturgeon, propelling itself fiercely through the waters of Maine and leaving bubbles in its wake. Or the kinetic energy that bursts from Aaron Favila’s frame of men massing to salvage electrical wire after a fire in a poor Philippine community.

Sometimes it’s what photographers call “negative space”: Petros Giannakouris’ image of the Parthenon and the moon at night, their magnificence dramatically amplified by the midnight-blue sky that fills most of the frame.

Sometimes it is juxtaposition across images and continents: Niranjan Shrestha’s photo of a demonstrator in Nepal, his hair cascading behind him and his arms outstretched after he grabbed a flak jacket and a shield from a policeman during the chaos of a protest – and its mirror image of joy, Andy Wong’s image of a woman with her own arms in the air as she jumps into a pool carved from ice in frozen northeastern China.

Sometimes it is pure grief and heartbreak, as in Julia Demaree Nikhinson’s close-up of Erika Kirk wiping a tear from her reddened right eye before speaking at a memorial for her husband, slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Or even double heartbreak: a Palestinian woman, gravely injured, holding the body of her infant daughter at Nasser Hospital in the Gaza Strip after an Israeli airstrike – and the realization that mere weeks later, the photographer herself, Mariam Dagga, would die in another airstrike while covering the same hospital.

Finally, sometimes it is simply quiet contemplation – a rarer moment in these jumbled days – as seen through the lens of Jenny Kane, who captured the silhouette of a lone man walking on the beach near a rock jutting from shore at the edge of the land in Oregon.

Whatever the subject, whatever the memorable trait, one thing is constant. In every single image, AP photographers carefully calibrated their equipment – both creative and mechanical – to bring the world glimpses of itself that resist forgetting.

And after a confusing year crammed with history and heartbreak, when only the images remain for most of us, that photographic act – carving grooves of collective memory with color and light and verve and creativity – may be one of the most important contributions of all.

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Photo editing by Benjamin Snyder, Enric Martí, and Jacqueline Larma.