Best of 2022: newyorker.com

Photo by Curran Hatleberg, from Joy Williams's "Curran Hatleberg's Florida, Past and Future"

Here are my favourite newyorker.com posts of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Joy Williams, “Curran Hatleberg’s Florida, Past and Future,” August 5, 2022 ("There was stasis; there was silence. Something happened, and then it was as if nothing had transpired after all. Photographs, by their very nature, can capture this frightening, fulsome dichotomy, and the best photographers can capture it again and again. This is Hatleberg’s talent. His images only appear to be forthright, to lack interiority. The depths are all on the surface. The depths have risen to the surface. The photographs testify not so much to “time’s relentless melt” (Susan Sontag’s phrase) as to time’s immutability, containing at once both future and past. Within each moment rests the aftermath." | "There is beer, and there are bees bearding the faces of men; there is a peeling painted sign offering honey, but there is no honey." | "The photo is beautifully composed—the youth’s slim torso, the light on his face, the young woman’s crisp and haughty profile—but what curiously engages us is the pine-tree air freshener on the rearview mirror." | "The standing water in these photographs is its own signifier. The water reflected in Hatleberg’s eye, in the world he is chronicling, is slack, slick with torpor. It lies on the compacted soil of the junk yard and the cement steps of homes. Its oily sheen coats the alleys and the marshes. Only once does it appear fresh, alive, sustaining the figure borne on the river at peace, as if in a dear dream");

2. Naomi Fry, “The Humans of Daniel Arnold’s New York,” January 29, 2022 ("The photographer Daniel Arnold is eerily adept at capturing perfect moments in his pictures, although “perfect,” in his case, doesn’t mean glossy or unblemished. Arnold’s work often traffics in the quotidian and the flawed, the discordant and the mottled; to him, perfection means locating beauty in what might otherwise be overlooked." | "These figures are not conventionally lovely, and yet Arnold is able to make striking images out of scenes that would otherwise fleet by, unnoticed." | "Each portrait is marked by its own seamless if precariously achieved internal logic: the pate of the old man is ringed by oddly spiky strands of white hair, which glint in the sun like a ghostly halo; the jeweller in the window is observed, as if he were an outsized mannequin, by a bystander outside the shop, and the store’s name—Shine Jewelry—seems to echo the purpose of the cleaning fluid at the man’s side; the puffy lips of the woman on her phone clash visually with the lowered lids of her heavily made-up eyes, making her face a sculptural contrast of protrusion and recession." | "It didn’t take long for him to hone his signature style: street portraits whose often-humble subjects are portrayed with a startling formal prowess." | "Arnold chronicles the interstitial weirdness of the city and the people in it, who are often too caught up in the busy stream of existence to pause and reflect on their lives");

3. Alice Driver, “The Impersonal Intimacy of Mexico’s Commuter Buses,” February 18, 2020 ("We begin the journey in a field, looking from afar at two empty buses, their blue-lit interiors glowing against the backdrop of a starless sky. When Cartagena boards his bus, we find ourselves peering out the window at other commuters, who appear trapped under the harsh glare of headlights while they wait for the bus to stop. In these predawn images, the vehicle’s lights cast an artificial lustre over passing people and cars, transforming oranges stacked in a truck bed into a mass of glowing orbs. The photographer shifts his gaze inside, and we’re now nestled among the passengers, like the fruit in the truck." | "As the city emerges, the passengers, stuck in traffic, look out at mobile billboards on the sides of other buses. The advertisements feature light-skinned women selling clothing, shoes, and feminine products. When the sun rises through the window, it feels banal, almost like another billboard");

4. Vince Aletti, “Alec Soth’s Obsessive Ode to Image-Making,” February 1, 2022, ("Soth has often invited us into his process, but, perhaps because it involves obsession, 'A Pound of Pictures' is more revealing than his earlier books. Working on it, he writes, reminded him of when he “first fell in love with photography. The camera was an excuse to wander and dig. | But, once the funeral train idea was put aside, Soth said in the course of a recent walk-through at Sean Kelly, he felt that he could 'liberate' himself simply by “paying attention to what I see”);

5. Kevin Dettmar, "What Drive My Car Reveals On Second Viewing," March 23, 2022 ("Sometimes these intertextual echoes simply provide grace notes. Early in the film, Kafuku is diagnosed with glaucoma in his left eye and prescribed eye drops to reduce the ocular pressure. The first time we see him use them, he’s been driving around Tokyo, staying away from his home, avoiding the talk that his wife has requested—and which he fears will signal the end of, or at least a cataclysmic change in, their relationship. In the parked car, his cassette tape plays, and Chekhov’s Sonya, voiced by his wife Oto, is in the midst of her closing monologue: 'And when our last hour comes we’ll go quietly. And in the great beyond we’ll say to Him that we suffered, that we cried, that life was hard.' And there’s Kafuku, with tears of prescription eye drops rolling down his cheek");

6. Joshua Yaffa, “War Comes to Kyiv,” February 26, 2022 ("It is clear that Russia’s invasion has little to do with the unresolved war in the Donbass, which had been seen as an obvious pretext, and is instead focussed on regime change. To remove Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and install a pliant, pro-Russia replacement, however, requires taking the capital." | "We pulled up to an apartment block on Lobanovskyi Prospect, a wide boulevard in the city’s southwest. At 8 a.m., a missile strike had torn through the building’s right side, leaving a three-story gash in its façade. Chunks of concrete and iron swayed in the breeze; every now and then, a piece of rubble crashed noisily onto the asphalt below. Glass dusted the street for blocks." | "We came to an overpass not far from the zoo, where Ukrainian soldiers had apparently repelled an attempt by Russian forces to infiltrate an advance force and weapons supply deep into the city. It was, by any measure, a terrible scene. Two burned-out shells of military vehicles stood prone in the street, with burn marks and shards of metal and glass trailing for half a mile. Twisted remains of explosive shells dotted the road. On the pavement, I saw pieces of what I thought might be flesh but tried not to pay too much attention");

7. Keith Gessen, “The One Place in Lviv Where the War Was Never Far Away,” March 29, 2022 ("In Lviv, on the western edge of Ukraine, most of the time the war felt very far away. Its shadow appeared, fleetingly, in the beautiful old cavernous Greek Catholic churches throughout the city, where people filled the pews and wept, and the priests, who perform the Byzantine liturgy in Ukrainian, called for God to protect the nation from its enemies; and in the basements and hallways and underground parking garages where people sheltered during the frequent air-raid sirens, most often at night; and in the old city after 8 p.m., when the curfew was approaching and all the many small restaurants and cafés closed; and in the many schools and nonprofits that had been turned into shelters for the people fleeing the bombing in the east of the country; but, still, most of the time, during the fourth week of the war, people in Lviv followed the bloodshed in the same way that everyone else in the world did: on television." | "At the station, the trains kept coming and people kept spilling out of them: dislocated, terrified, traumatized. | Every hour, a train arrived in the station from the east and disgorged a large group of women and children. It was only women and children, because men were not allowed out of the country, and, anyway, most of the men had chosen to stay home to fight. The names of the places that families were fleeing—Sumy, Kramatorsk, Kharkiv—created a kind of map of the worst fighting, delayed by a couple days, because that’s how long it took them to arrive");

8. Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege of Chernihiv,” April 15, 2022 ("On March 3rd, Russian aircraft streaked overhead and dropped at least eight bombs that slammed into a group of apartment buildings on Viacheslava Chornovola Street, in the center of town. A line of people had formed at a pharmacy nearby—with medicine in short supply, the news of an open pharmacy had led dozens to run over as quickly as they could. Those standing outside were left a gruesome pile of flesh and limbs and ash. Cement walls crumbled into pieces; window glass shattered into a mist that left people cut and bloodied in their apartments. Whole floors collapsed, crushing those underneath. Forty-seven people were killed, making the bombing among the most deadly single attacks of the entire war." | "It was a gray, drizzling morning when I pulled up to the site of the attack. What was once the pharmacy was now a burnt-out shell of red brick. One building had taken a direct hit, leaving an entire wall ripped open, with apartments inside exposed like a doll house. I passed the charred hulls of half a dozen cars, and walked into a courtyard. A giant crater, perhaps ten feet across and more than six feet deep, appeared, as if someone had taken a giant ice-cream scoop to the earth. International investigators, including those from Amnesty International, concluded that the Russian Air Force used FAB-500 bombs in the attack—unguided, Soviet-era munitions that each weigh more than a thousand pounds").

9. Luke Mogelson, “Collecting Bodies in Bucha,” April 6, 2022 ("At the end of Havryliuk’s street, a number of corpses had been severely burned beside a garbage pile. It was hard to say how many there were—charred legs and torsos were severed and scattered—but one victim appeared to be a woman, another a child or an adolescent. Orphaned cats and dogs sniffed around the parts. Several people reported that Russians had brought the bodies on a tank, dumped them, and lit them on fire." | "The relentless fighting in Bucha had hindered Matiuk and his team from conducting their work, and he told me that, since the Russian retreat, they had picked up about three hundred corpses. He estimated that at least a hundred had had their hands tied behind their back. When I asked him where in town he’d encountered such cases, he replied, 'Everywhere' ");

10. Keith Gessen, “How the War in Ukraine Might End,” September 29, 2022 (" 'For a war to end,' Goemans said, 'the minimum demands of at least one of the sides must change.' This is the first rule of war termination. And we have not yet reached a point where war aims have changed enough for a peace deal to be possible. | He saw a future in which Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire and then gradually turned itself into a “military hedgehog,” a prickly country that no one would want to invade").