At 2:48 A.M. on Friday, June 21st, several hours after the N.B.A. announced the 2019 draft picks, the press room at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, was deserted. But the photographer Cait Oppermann and Alexandra Genova, Oppermann’s digital tech, were staring intently at a glowing computer screen. The two women were reviewing hundreds of photographs of the newest members of the N.B.A., the results of a photo shoot that had wrapped earlier that night. They were nearing the end of an ambitious project: The New Yorker’s editors were holding ten pages of space in the print magazine for a photo essay, but that photo essay had yet to be edited, color-corrected, laid out, reported, fact-checked, or copy-edited. During the next ten hours, with the help of the magazine’s editorial staff, the photo department produced a stunning portfolio of Oppermann’s images, which showcased the emotions as well as the sartorial choices of draft day.
This portfolio was one of many striking photo commissions published in the magazine this year. In July, the photojournalist Adam Ferguson spent more than two weeks in Afghanistan with the contributing writer Luke Mogelson, meeting former ISIS commanders and reporting on life in the country after eighteen years of war. In March, the photographer Vasantha Yogananthan travelled to the remote mountainous territory of Ladakh, in northern India, to investigate an idiosyncratic solution to the erratic supply of water in the high-desert region: the ice stupa. Built at nearly twelve thousand feet, these massive ice sculptures melt in the spring, providing water to farmers in the area.
Powerful portraits are a hallmark of the magazine, and this year Danna Singer’s emotional image of Jessica Lester, the subject of Rachel Aviv’s investigation of domestic violence and the police, stopped us in our tracks. Ryan McGinley spent an afternoon in Iggy Pop’s back yard just outside Miami to capture a portrait of the singer (and his sinewy torso) against lush greenery. To illustrate Larissa MacFarquhar’s article on one of the country’s first domestic-violence shelters, the photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon, who is eighty-nine, travelled from New York to a Boston suburb with her medium-format camera to hold a portrait session with one of the shelter’s first residents.
Some of the most creative photographs in the magazine accompanied the short fiction that is published in each issue. Nakeya Brown’s meticulously composed, anonymous portrait illustrated Rion Amilcar Scott’s story “Shape-Ups at Delilah’s,” while Lucas Blalock’s conceptual image of a floating vintage telephone conjured the ghostly repeated calls in David Rabe’s first story for the magazine, “Uncle Jim Called.”
You can find these images, and many more, in this collection of our favorite photographs from 2019.
