The Best Photo Essays of 2024

The photo essay remains one of journalism's most powerful formats: visual narratives that communicate truths words alone cannot capture. In 2024, photographers around the world produced work that documented crisis, celebrated beauty, and revealed hidden dimensions of daily life.

The most widely seen single image of 2024 came out of Gaza. Mohammed Salem's photograph of Inas Abu Maamar holding the wrapped body of her five-year-old niece, made for Reuters in Khan Younis, took World Press Photo of the Year. Look at how it is built rather than only at what it shows: the face is hidden, the arms carry the entire composition, and it sits closer to a Pietà than to news.

The New York Times' visual investigations set a new standard for visual journalism in conflict zones. The combination of satellite imagery, ground-level photography, and data visualization provided context that neither text reporting nor individual photographs could achieve independently.

National Geographic's feature on the melting Thwaites Glacier combined drone photography, underwater imaging, and portraits of scientists. The scale of the images, vast ice shelves contrasted with tiny human figures, communicated the climate crisis with visceral impact that data charts cannot match.

Magnum Photos continued to produce essential documentary work. Alessandra Sanguinetti's ongoing project about two girls growing up in rural Argentina, now spanning over two decades, added new chapters reflecting on time, change, and the relationship between photographer and subject.

Sanguinetti began photographing Guillermina and Belinda in Buenos Aires province in 1999, when they were nine years old. The work has run for more than twenty-five years across two Mack books, and its subject has quietly become time rather than the girls. Magnum, founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour, was set up precisely so photographers owned their negatives and could work this slowly.

The Washington Post's photo essay on America's last phone booth repairman combined humor and melancholy. The photographs captured both the absurdity and dignity of the work, using the subject as a lens through which to examine obsolescence and persistence.

Independent publications also delivered remarkable work. Aperture magazine's issue on Black American pastoral life featured photographers reimagining rural Black experience beyond trauma narratives. The images were luminous, celebratory, and politically potent in their insistence on Black joy as a documentary subject.

How to judge a photo essay: read the sequence, not the pictures. A picture editor typically cuts thousands of frames down to ten or twelve, and the order they land in is the argument. Watch which frame opens and which closes, whether the scale moves between wide and close, and whether any single image still makes sense pulled out on its own. If every frame is a strong standalone, it is a portfolio, not an essay.

You do not have to buy anything to study the form. The Library of Congress hosts the entire Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information archive online, roughly 175,000 negatives by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks and others, free and out of copyright. For current work, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize shortlist shows at The Photographers' Gallery on Ramillies Street in London each spring, and Paris Photo fills the Grand Palais every November.

https://www.magnumphotos.com/