Best of 2022: Photos

Mila Teshaieva, Bridge Over Irpin River (2022)

Here are my favorite New Yorker photos of 2022:

1. Mila Teshaieva's photo for Keith Gessen's "How the War in Ukraine Might End," September 29, 2022 (see above);

2. Dina Litovsky's photo for Helen Rosner's "We Watch the News and We're Crying" (March 8, 2022);

3. James Nachtwey's photo for his "A Harrowed Land" (May 9, 2022);

4. Mark Neville's photo for his "Days of War" (March 7, 2022);

5. Peter Fisher's photo for "Goings On About Town" (August 8, 2022);

6. Jérôme Sessini's photo for Masha Gessen's "The Devastation of Kharkiv" (March 22, 2022);

7. Philip Montgomery's photo for his "Blade Runners" (November 28, 2022);

8. Paul S. Amundsen's photo for Rebecca Mead's "Norwegian Wood" (April 25 & May 2, 2022);

9. Daniel Berehulak's photo for Luke Mogelson's "Everyone Is a Target" (August 1, 2022);

10. Eric Helgas's photo for Shauna Lyon's "Tables For Two: El Quijote" (June 6, 2022).

Mid-Year Top Ten 2022

Photo by James Nachtwey, from Luke Mogelson's "The Wound-Dressers"

It’s time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

Top Ten Reporting Pieces

1. Luke Mogelson, “The Wound-Dressers,” May 9, 2022 (“A Ukrainian soldier approached me to say that he’d found another victim. I followed him into the basement of a yellow house, where a rail-thin teen-ager was crumpled on the floor. Blood had leaked from his mouth and nose. The soldier crouched and felt under his skull. ‘He was shot in the back of the head,’ he said”).

2. Ed Caesar, “Sanctuary,” June 27, 2022 (“Inna, Sasha, and Oliviia loaded their bags onto the bus. Inna knew that it might be the last time that she and the girls saw Maksym, but there was no emotional soliloquy from either husband or wife. ‘It wasn’t a movie scene,’ Inna told me. ‘I was concentrated on what is coming—on my tasks. But we both knew what was going on’ ”).

3. Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege,” March 21, 2022 (“War has split Shchastia yet again. Dunets, the civil-military-administration head, was recalled back to the Ukrainian Army, and is fighting with the 128th Brigade. Tyurin, his deputy, stayed on in the city administration, albeit under a new flag. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. I told them to fuck off,’ he said”).

4. Joshua Yaffa, “The Captive City,” May 23, 2021 (“An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. ‘This was happening one metre away,’ Fedorov said. ‘What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?’ ”).

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Five O’Clock Everywhere,” March 28, 2022 (“Late in the day, I found McChesney playing cornhole in the village square with some friends. I joined in for a while, and then we loaded up the cornhole boards and got into his golf cart and, beers in hand, hummed down the cart path, in the pink subtropical twilight, pines and palms whizzing by, a whiff of fry grease lingering in the air”).

6. Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In,” May 30, 2022 (“I was two minutes late for my treatment. ‘Oh là,’ the therapist clucked, looking at her watch. She instructed me to undress—the spa provided a disposable G-string—and to sit on a table covered with a plastic sheet. Without further discussion, she began daubing my back at strategic points with steaming, tawny mud. When she had finished, she eased me into a reclining position and folded the sheet around me, forming a sort of Hot Pocket in which the mud was the cheese and I was the ham”).

7. William Finnegan, “Big Breaks,” May 30, 2022 (“The only time the waves seem to have any heft at all is when the rider gets deeply barrelled. Suddenly, we’re in a blue room with walls of rushing water, and we’re being pursued by a horizontal waterfall and a fire hose of mist”).

8. John Seabrook, “Green Giants,” January 31, 2022 (“The pits were a mechanical Pamplona of nitromethane bulls, their belching tailpipes and fiery exhaust wrinkling the air, and their pit crews almost feral with the oddly fruity aroma of the fuel and the acrid stench of the smoking, treadless tires that the guys called slicks”).

9. Rebecca Mead, “Norwegian Wood,” April 25 & May 2, 2022 (“I put my bag down on a blond-wood coffee table by the window, and settled into a low swivel chair, its comfortable backrest fashioned from bent-wood strips. In December, Brumunddal enjoys less than six hours of daylight; had I sat there long enough, I could have watched the sun rise and set with only the barest swivel to adjust my line of sight. The room was quiet and, despite the lowering skies, it was light. With its minimal, tasteful furnishings—a narrow blond-wood desk; a double bed made up with white linens and a crimson blanket—it had the virtuous feel of a spa”).

10. Joshua Yaffa, “The Great Thaw,” January 17, 2022 (“Fedorov brought me to a large walk-in freezer, where lumps of flesh and fur were piled on metal shelves; the crescent bend of a tusk was unmistakable. As Fedorov explained, these mammoth remains, dug up across Yakutia, were being stored at zero degrees Fahrenheit, awaiting further scientific study. The space was cramped and frigid—so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought. I picked up a leg that once belonged to the Maly Lyakhovsky mammoth, a thick stump with reddish-brown hair. ‘Look, its footpad is very well traced,’ Fedorov said. You can see its toenails’ ”).

Best Personal History Piece

John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three,” February 7, 2022 (“Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses”).

Best Cover

Faith Ringgold, “Jazz Stories: Somebody Stole My Broken Heart” (March 28, 2022)

Best Critical Piece

Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out,” May 16, 2022 (“Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh”).

Best “Talk of the Town” Story

Laura Preston, “Incidental Masterpieces,” April 4, 2022 (“Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading ‘Alone Ave.’; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops”).

Best Illustration

Sergiy Maidukov, "Postcard from Kyiv” (January 31, 2022).

Best “Goings On About Town” Review

Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: All’Antico Vinaio,” April 25 & May 2, 2022 (“Towering stacks of schiacciata emerged from the basement at regular intervals, shiny with olive oil and sparkling with coarse salt, releasing clouds of steam from a dense landscape of air bubbles as the loaves were sliced horizontally, ends slivered off and passed to patiently waiting customers”).  

Best newyorker.com Post

Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege of Chernihiv,” April 15, 2022 (“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”).  

Best Short Story

Kevin Barry, “The Pub With No Beer,” April 11, 2022 (“ ‘It could be one of forty-two things that’s wrong with me,’ Frank Waught half whispered to a pint of Smithwick’s”).

Best Photo

Photo by Dina Litovsky, for Helen Rosner's " 'We Watch the News and We're Crying,' " newyorker.com, March 8, 2020.

Best Sentence

One suture on the bowl’s lip was the result of it being dropped last year by a Tampa grinder named Pat Maroon. – Nick Paumgarten and Sarah Larson, “We Want the Cup”

Best Paragraph

I braced myself. The water pressure was intense—almost strong enough to clean a sidewalk. I could taste the salt. The therapist was yelling instructions, but I could hardly hear them over the roar of the spray. She started with my ankles, working methodically up the line: calves, thighs, butt, triceps, shoulders. As she power-washed my back, I fixated on a single thought: Please don’t hit a mole! – Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In”

Best Detail

In “Blue-Eyed Marble Box,” from 1965, an undercurrent of perversity surfaces: a Queen Anne coffee table forms the base of a blocky centauride, whose rectangular torso is pierced by rolling-pin finial nipples. – Johanna Fateman, “Art: Kate Millett” 

Best Description

Chopin’s Nocturne No. 7, in C-sharp minor, begins with a low, ashen sound: a prowling arpeggio in the left hand, consisting only of C-sharps and G-sharps. It’s a hollowed-out harmony, in limbo between major and minor. Three bars in, the right hand enters on E, seemingly establishing minor, but a move to E-sharp clouds the issue, pointing toward major. Although the ambiguity dissipates in the measures that follow, a nimbus of uncertainty persists. Something even eerier happens in the tenth bar. The melody abruptly halts on the leading tone of B-sharp while the left hand gets stuck in another barren pattern—this one incorporating the notes D, A, and C-sharp. It’s almost like a glitch, a frozen screen. Then comes a moment of wistful clarity: an immaculate phrase descends an octave, with a courtly little turn on the fourth step of the scale. It is heard only once more before it disappears. I always yearn in vain for the tune’s return: a sweetly murmuring coda doesn’t quite make up for its absence. Ultimate beauty always passes too quickly. – Alex Ross, "Moonlight”

Best Question

Why did Laphroaig suggest thick-sliced bacon? – John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three”

Seven Memorable Lines

1. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. “I told them to fuck off,” he said. – Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege”

2. In the Margaritaville calculus, the benefits of good company outweigh the deleterious effects of alcohol. Merriment is medicinal. – Nick Paumgarten, “Five O’Clock Everywhere”

3. A barking fox kind of gags and hacks, like a cat coughing up a hair ball, except that the fox sounds as if he’s enjoying it. – Ian Frazier, “Stir-Crazy”

4. Gorgeous? Oh, yeah. – Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out”

5. Any writer would have trouble wringing interest out of “Achy Breaky Heart,” “Titanic,” “Friends,” and Pauly Shore. – Frank Guan, “The Decade of Disquiet”

6. I filled a cup and tried it. Rotten eggs and cabbage soup—yes. But chalky, too. I felt like I had licked a blackboard. – Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In”

7. There seem to be more kinds of foam mattresses than there are craft beers from Brooklyn, but don’t be fooled by proprietary terms like “Ambien-injected kosher crypto-foam.”  – Patricia Marx, “Tossed and Turned”

Best of 2020: newyorker.com

Photo by Deanna Dikeman, from Erin Orbey's "A Photographer's Parents Wave Farewell"

Here are my favourite newyorker.com posts of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Eren Orbey’s “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell,” March 4, 2020 (“Each image reiterates the quiet loyalty of her parents’ tradition. They recede into the warm glow of the garage on rainy evenings and laugh under the eaves in better weather. In summer, they blow kisses from the driveway. In winter, they wear scarves and stand behind snowbanks. Inevitably, they age”).

2. Emma Cline’s “Mike Mandel’s Selfies from the Seventies,” October 12, 2020 (“When Mandel pressed the timer, placing himself among the lives of strangers, it was the photographic equivalent of a toss of the coins in I Ching: you ask the universe to reveal itself; you await the universe’s answer”).

3. Helen Rosner’s “What We’re Buying for the Quarantine,” March 18, 2020 (photographs by Dina Litovsky).

Photo by Dina Litovsky, from Helen Rosner's "What We"re Buying for the Quarantine"

4. Rachel Syme’s “The Queen’s Gambit Is the Most Satisfying Show on Television,” November 13, 2020 (“But for me the glamour of the series is another of its quiet subversions. In life and on screen, chess is considered the domain of hoary men in moth-eaten cardigans, playing in smoky gymnasia that reek of stale coffee. ‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ instead, finds an unlikely synergy between the heady interiority of chess and the sensual realm of style”).

5. Andy Friedman’s “The Return of Kathleen Edwards,” August 8, 2020.

Illustration by Andy Friedman, from his "The Return of Kathleen Edwards"

6. Charlotte Mendelson’s “Sunflowers, with Love and Hate,” October 7, 2020 (“My sunflowers, grown from seed and standing proud among my dumpy black-currant bushes and rampaging mint, do rather dominate my garden”).

7. Maeve Dunigan’s “Poems Edgar Allan Poe Wrote While Lost In a Corn Maze,” October 30, 2020 (“Melancholy is the man / Who enters corn without a plan”).

8. Charles McGrath’s “Remembering Daniel Menaker, A Lighthearted Champion of His Writers,” October 29, 2020 (“Dan cared passionately about his writers. He defended them against what he thought was The New Yorker’s overly rigid house style, and sometimes preserved their eccentricities just for their own sake”).

9. Johanna Fateman's "The Photographer Who Set Out to Watch Herself Age," December 16, 2020 ("The shutter's cable release is like a part of her always in hand, its dark tail trailing out of the frame").

10. Chris Wiley’s “A Photographer and an Inmate Exchange Ways of Seeing,” December 13, 2020 (“At the heart of Soth and Cabrera’s connection is art: art as a container of meaning, a honing steel for the sensibilities, a lodestar for living”).

Best of 2020: Photos

Photo by Joseph Michael Lopez, for "April 15, 2020"

Here are my favorite New Yorker photographs of 2020:

1. Joseph Michael Lopez’s photo for “April 15, 2020,” May 4, 2020 (see above).

2. Naila Ruechel’s photo for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: EMP To Go” (November 23, 2020).

3. Dina Litovsky’s photo for Helen Rosner’s “What We’re Buying for the Quarantine” (March 18, 2020).

4. Paolo Pellegrin’s photo for Ben Taub’s “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” (May 18, 2020).

5. Collier Schorr’s photo for Amanda Petrusich’s “Opened Up” (October 19, 2020).

6. Andre D. Wagner’s photo for “April 15, 2020” (May 4, 2020).

7. Caroline Tompkins’ photo for Hannah Goldfield’s “Table for Two: Aquavit” (January 27, 2020).

8. Christaan Felber’s photo for “This Week” (April 27, 2020).

9. Christopher Payne’s photo for his “Vital Vessels” (December 7, 2020).

10. Heami Lee’s photo for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Edy’s Grocer” (December 7, 2020).

May 4, 2020 Issue

The New Yorker’s coronavirus coverage continues to impress immensely. Of its many superb pieces – Peter Hessler’s “Life on Lockdown,” Adam Gopnik’s “Abundance of Caution,” Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The One and the Many,” Rivka Galchen’s “The Longest Shift,” Jonathan Blitzer’s “Juan Sanabria” – perhaps the most striking and original (so far) is “April 15, 2020,” in this week’s issue. It's a kaleidoscopic account of a single day in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, written by twenty-five New Yorker reporters and illustrated (in the online version) by seventeen photographers. 

Comprising thirty-two snapshots of life in the city, the piece is structured chronologically, beginning “soon after midnight” at John F. Kennedy Airport and ending twenty-four hours later at Lower Manhattan Hospital. In between, it visits, among other places, Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach (“The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere”); the Amazon fulfilment center on Staten Island (“Previously, masked employees wielding thermometer guns had taken co-workers’ temperatures as they entered the four-story building; now an automated system was in place”); the Hudson Theatre near Times Square (“A drained wash of yellowish light came from a single bulb on the lip of the stage”); the Montefiore Medical Center, in the Bronx (“Urgent codes rang out on the P.A. system: ‘Rapid response,’ for when a patient can’t breathe; ‘C.A.C.,’ for cardiac arrest”); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“But, that morning, as daffodils bloomed and cherry trees shed pink petals onto sidewalks all over the city, the urns stood empty”); the American Museum of Natural History (“In individual containers on a sunny windowsill, a dozen large garden spiders sat in their webs”); the Herald Square subway station (“An elderly woman dozed behind a phone-charging kiosk, sitting on a suitcase, leaning against a well-filled shopping cart, her head nodding”); an I.C.U. at Weill Cornell Medicine (“Bright fluorescent lights; on the bed, a gaunt man with paper-white hair, age seventy-five. Intubated. His skin was nearly translucent”); the top floor of an East Village walkup (“Near the window, Fredericks tuned his electric guitar—a teal-blue Bobkat with a Stratocaster neck”); Sherman’s Flatbush Memorial Chapel, in Midwood, Brooklyn (“Inside, four tables held eight bodies, some of them in scuffed orange pouches from the hospital, others in clear sleeves no thicker than garbage bags”); on a tugboat on the north shore of Staten Island (“With its nearly seven-thousand-horsepower engines and azimuth propeller, it can go forward, backward, and sideways, or spin like a top on the water”).

“She wore a high-visibility vest, and her eyes danced brightly above a blue mask” – I relish sentences like that. “April 15, 2020” brims with them.

My favourite part is the visit to Russ & Daughters on East Houston Street. The reporter (is it Helen Rosner?) describes the aroma inside the shop: “The next day, the air was perfumed with a familiar smell—smoky, briny, yeasty-sweet—tinged with a jagged note of surface cleaner.” The quotation at the end made me smile:

Tupper regarded the assemblage as it came together on the counter. “This is a small little order,” he said. “But you know, right now, if someone wants a quarter pound of whitefish salad, we’re doing whatever we can.”

Whoever conceived the idea of this brilliant mosaic portrait of twenty-four hours in the life of NYC as it struggles to deal with the pandemic is a genius. Bravo, New Yorker!

Postscript: The online version of “April 15, 2020” is a remarkable photo text, featuring forty-five still images and four short video loops. The photos and videos don’t appear to depict people or scenes mentioned in the text, but they certainly complement it. Like the text, they document New York's coronavirus reality. Many of them are artfully matter-of-fact. For example:

Andre D. Wagner, "11:50 A.M., Williamsburg, Brooklyn"

Joseph Michael Lopez, "2:53 P.M., West Farms, the Bronx"

Dina Litovsky, "9:58 P.M., Times Square"

My favourite “April 15, 2020” illustration is Sam Youkilis’s “10:13 A.M., Tribeca,” a transfixing fifteen second video loop showing a masked florist assembling a bouquet of purple lilacs – the visual equivalent of a lyric poem. My eyes devour it. 

Dina Litovsky's Striking "Jessica West" Photo

Photo by Dina Litvosky for Helen Rosner's "What We're Buying for the Quarantine"

One of the best New Yorker photos of the year (so far) is Dina Litovsky’s picture of an interesting looking woman named Jessica West, wearing sunglasses, surgical mask, and a beautiful textured brown-tan-orange sweater, standing in front of pallets loaded with boxes, bottles, and other subtly colorful items. The photo is one among several excellent Litovskys illustrating Helen Rosner’s “What We’re Buying for the Quarantine” (newyorker.com, March 18, 2020.

Litovsky first impinged my consciousness with her striking kubaneh-in-a-flowerpot photo for Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Timma" (The New Yorker, October 26, 2015). That one made my “Best of 2015: Photos.”

Her sharp capture of Phil Young for Nicolas Niarchos’s “Tables For Two: Lenox Saphire” (January 2, 2017) was on my “Best of 2017: Photos.”

And I wouldn’t be surprised if her “Jessica West” appears on my “Best of 2020” list. 

Excellent work, Dina! 

Best of 2017: Photos

 Mauricio Lima, "Women and Children Mourning the Death of Two Kurdish Soldiers" (2017)

Here are my favorite New Yorker photographs of 2017:

1. Mauricio Lima’s “Women and Children Mourning the Death of Two Kurdish Soldiers,” for Luke Mogelson’s “Dark Victory” (November 6, 2017).

2. Mauricio Lima’s “Female Fighters for the Syrian Democratic Forces," for Luke Mogelson’s “Dark Victory” (November 6, 2017).

3. Thomas Prior’s “Irad and Jose Ortiz,” for John Seabrook’s “Top Jocks” (December 4, 2017).

4. William Mebane’s “Tim Ho Wan,” for Jiayang Fan’s “Tables For Two: Tim Ho Wan” (April 17, 2017).

5. Victor J. Blue’s “Captain Basam Attallah Shoots at a Cache of ISIS Explosives,” for Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (February 6, 2017).

6. Daniel Shea’s “Peter Doig,” for Calvin Tomkins’s “Somewhere Different” (December 11, 2017).

7. Nadine Ijewere’s “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye,” for Zadie Smith’s “A Bird of Few Words” (June 19, 2017).

8. Dina Litovsky’s “Phil Young,” for Nicolas Niarchos’s “Tables For Two: Lenox Saphire” (January 2, 2017).

9. Nadav Kander’s “Julian Assange,” for Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Man Without a Country” (August 21, 2017).

10. Amy Lombard’s “Sexy Taco/Dirty Cash,” for Nicolas Niarchos’s “Tables For Two: Sexy Taco/Dirty Cash” (February 6, 2017).