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2023 may have been dominated by the rapid rise of AI imagery, but it is increasingly clear that photojournalism is and always will be way more important.

It is through photographs that we can empathise with our fellow humans, feeling their pain, grief, and desperation to keep on going amidst great adversity.

The haunting image above shows all that remained of a Russian soldier on a road in the Donetsk region of southern Ukraine on September 26. It is just one of the top 100 striking photos of 2023 shared by TIME, with Canadian wildfires, war in the Middle East, and newly-born panda twins also making the cut.

PetaPixel notes that the photos mostly come from photographers working for major news organisations who are sometimes in danger themselves as they capture breathtaking imagery.

“As we draw close to the end of another year punctuated by grief and conflict, but also records broken and breathtaking moments of human achievement, photographers continue to astound us by offering new ways of seeing the world,” writes TIME’s director of photography Katherine Pomerantz.

“The storytellers who are dedicated to bearing witness to events across the globe in real-time are critical in providing lucidity to an otherwise muddled world. As such, the weight of responsibility on them to act ethically, and with the highest level of journalistic integrity, is greater now than perhaps ever in history.”

Just a heads up, some of the following photos could be distressing to some viewers.

Here’s the giant panda mother Ai Bao and her newly born female twin pandas, the first to be born in the country, at Everland Amusement and Animal Park in Yongin, South Korea, on July 7:

A child is passed over a narrow stretch of the Rio Grande at the US border with Mexico on March 29. Driven partly by a surge of Venezuelans seeking asylum, a record number of people migrated from South and Central America to the US, with arrivals reaching 2.5 million in the federal fiscal year that ended in October:

Extreme weather conditions fueled Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, with thousands of fires devastating millions of acres and darkening skies thousands of miles away. This shot shows flames from the McDougall Creek wildfire encircling a mountainside above homes in West Kelowna, British Columbia, on August 18:

Shepherd Józef Klimowski, left, and others lead a flock of sheep in Nowy Targ, Poland, in the country’s southern highlands, on October 8:

Then, a photographer managed to capture a young girl stuck under her house rubble after it was bombed by Israeli airstrikes at Al Nusairat refugee camp, on October 31:

Sarah Salmonese sits where her apartment once stood in Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii, two days after it was devastated by wildfire, on August 11:

An Afghan boy mourns next to the grave of his little brother who died due to an earthquake, in Zenda Jan district in Herat province, western of Afghanistan, on October 9:

Villarrica volcano, one of the most active volcanoes in South America, is seen from Villarrica, south of Santiago, Chile, on September 27:

An aerial view of Bakhmut, the site of the heaviest battles with Russian troops in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, on June 22:

Accumulation of rubbish in the streets of Paris on the ninth day of the garbage collectors’ strike against the pension reform on March 14:

Catch the other 90 images over at TIME.

[source:petapixel]