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We stand at scenic overlooks and lift our lens to capture a post card view that, of course, looks better on a postcard. It’s not about gear, or the 10,000 hours. It’s simply that almost any photograph is improved by having people in it—a lesson TIME’s Top 100 Photographs of 2025 underscores in images that capture not only a year, but also the faint but discernable shadow cast by a less human future.
The moments photojournalists document tend to be most visible on faces: the panic of a fallen runner about to be spiked, the anguish in an immigrant in a headlock, a smiling Buddha toppled in a quake. Robots (in a footrace, at a bedside) serve as comic relief partly because they have no faces. But, as machines, they carry the same ambiguous edge as artificial intelligence. In Ahmedabad, the tail section of an Air India flight juts from a building like a paper airplane that sailed in and stuck. And in Portland, Ore., sworn agents of the United States government all but disappear inside red smoke, body armor and gas masks. — Karl Vick
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