National Geographic Magazine - UK January 2021

MANY SUPERLATIVES can be applied to 2020, most of them negative. “Worst year ever,” I’ve heard people say—a subjective judgment we each would make differently. But it was unquestionably a harrowing year, marked by COVID-19’s tragic death toll, the hurtful racial strife, and the divisive political environment. In this special issue, “The Year in Pictures,” we’ve documented 2020 through the work of some of the world’s most gifted photographers. In our 133 years, National Geographic has never singled out one year for a retrospective like this. But if ever a year demanded that, 2020 does. In some respects, making this issue was not hard. We added more than 1.7 million images to the National Geographic archive last year—likely fewer than usual because the pandemic complicated travel assignments, but still a…

National Geographic photographers seem possessed of an inner GPS. Fueled by restless curiosity, they roam the planet in search of fresh perspectives to capture and new stories to tell. In 2020 this inner GPS took RUDDY ROYE to the front lines of America’s racial reckoning and set DAVID GUTTENFELDER on the trail of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the year’s losses and chaos, ANAND VARMA captured rare natural marvels, HANNAH REYES MORALES recorded soothing scenes of peace, and DIANA MARKOSIAN witnessed triumphs of the human will. On the following pages, the five answer this question: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC JANUARY 2021 • PAGE 7…

‘OUR JOB IS TO BE PART OF THIS STRUGGLE IN A VERY POSITIVE WAY.’ MY SONS ARE 15 AND 12. We don’t do it every day, but frequently we sit down and talk about events. We talked about George Floyd, because I was in Houston to photograph the funeral after George died May 25 with a policeman’s knee on his neck. I started out by saying to them that when I was allowed to go into the church and photograph George, I did not photograph him for 12 minutes. Like, people were behind me going, Dude, let’s go. You know, the line of people waiting. But for me it was important to tell George’s body thanks. Thanks for his life. Thanks for the opportunities that we’re all going to get…

‘IT WAS SUCH A REVELATION, SEEING THIS PANDEMIC PLAY OUT ON GLOBAL AND GRANULAR SCALES.’ OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS I’ve been working on “Living Lullabies,” my project on how caregivers create safer spaces for their children through nighttime song and story. My reporting partner, Rupert Compston, and I went to the Turkish-Syrian border; for refugee and migrant families there, lullabies were a piece of home that they could take with them, almost as portable sanctuaries. We went to Liberia, where we spoke with young mothers who’d had their babies as teenagers, and saw how they were singing hope in their lullabies. Then we visited Mongolia, one of the coldest places in the world. To heat their homes, nomadic families would burn coal, which of course pollutes the air. We…

Hannah Reyes Morales feels strongly about how media depict “women who are survivors.” In part that’s because she is a survivor of childhood sexual assault. And she’s committed to using photography to document the realities of women survivors’ lives, which, she says, often are “much more complex than they’re made out to be.” In the project “Shelter from the Storm,” Morales partnered with writer Aurora Almendral to tell the stories of Filipinas who left rural provinces to become sex workers in Angeles City, a Philippine red-light district. Many of the women support families in villages that, as climate change worsens, may increasingly be devastated by typhoons. Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest tropical cyclones on record, hit the Philippines in 2013. It displaced some four million people, creating what one…

‘I FELT SO GRATEFUL THAT I COULD BE OUT IN THE WORLD. I HAD A SENSE OF PURPOSE.’ WHEN THE PANDEMIC HIT, I told my editors I’d go wherever they needed me—Italy, China, New York, any of the hot spots. Their response was, essentially, Easy, tiger. It’s not going to work like that anymore. Nobody was going anywhere. So I had to figure out what to do to contribute responsibly to a story that has affected everybody in the world. I soon realized it meant working in my own backyard, which for me means the Midwest. I started driving all over, sleeping some nights in my truck. I was looking for what the virus meant to people in “flyover country,” a part of the country that is often ignored. I…