NYT and CNN present year in pictures

Every year in late December the media do their annual roundups. Stories of the year. Movies of the year. Products of the year. Every list and category you can imagine. My favorites, however, are usually the photo roundups. Best pictures of the year or the year in pictures. Visual feasts of the year’s great photojournalism. The New York Times has posted a nice slideshow, but I found it a bit bland. One of my favorite photos is their cover shot, an aerial view of the devastation left by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.

To date the slideshow that had me saying “Wow!” more than once is CNN’s. Newsworthy photographs, but each, in turn, dramatic, touching, shocking, or artistic. NYT seemed more concerned with the story being depicted. With CNN, the photograph is the story.

Some of my favorites (please click to see larger format):

May 8: The Tungurahua volcano is seen from the village of Cotalo, Ecuador. Tungurahua keeps generating explosions and expelling incandescent boulders that roll down its flanks.

November 21: Karis, an 11-week-old lion cub, plays in fallen leaves in her enclosure at Blair Drummond Safari Park near Stirling, Scotland.

November 23: Tribesmen lead their camels through the sand dunes of the Liwa desert in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

December 5: An airplane passes the moon, leaving behind a vapor trail over Lahore, Pakistan.

December 11: A woman looks out a dusty bus window on the way to see Mandela’s casket in Pretoria, South Africa. The anti-apartheid icon’s casket arrived in the country’s capital for public viewing.

December 11: An impala leaps high into the air to avoid the gaping jaws of a crocodile in South Luangwa National Park in Zambia.

December 20: A man stacks bricks at a brick factory in Lalitpur, Nepal.

While you’re in photo browsing mode, you might also enjoy the Huffington Post’s “The 52 Most Breathtaking Photos From Around The World This Year.” Or Time Magazine’s “2013: The Year in 365 Pictures” and other collections.

If nothing else, these retrospectives remind us how very lucky we are to live in a peaceful nation where our day-to-day lives are generally without chaos, tragedy, or war.