Or what summer two groups of men - one in police uniforms - grabbed the limbs of a young Black protester, surrounded by people in masks.
No one looking through these images a few years hence will have to ask, when they come to the tableau of a body and people in hazmat on a China street, when that photo was taken. Here was a year with the palette of an Arctic winter, variations on a darkness that just goes on and on, time suspended first by lockdowns that threw life out of routine, then by the understanding that nothing would be the same after. The news photos that captured 2020 - shown here in TIME’s annual unranked selection of 100 - almost need no time stamp, so distinctive was its look. It was a long year made to feel longer by the shadows that lay across it, one atop the next, and experienced as a miasma visible as atmosphere in so many of the photographs that define it: The half-light of a temporary morgue.
