TIME's Top 100 Photos of 2020

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. Of a city street obscured by tear gas. Of a wildfire’s traveling dusk.

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. 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.