A human tide of would-be Americans, rolling toward the border. American rockets streaking across the darkness over Damascus. Students fleeing a gunman at a Florida high school, their hands raised in the air.
Associated Press photographers were there to record a world in constant motion in 2018. Some of it was huge, and destructive – lava pouring from a Filipino volcano, the leveling of Indonesian neighborhoods by an earthquake, the wildfires that raced across California. Some of it was human scaled, but no less epic – disgraced comedian Bill Cosby being led in handcuffs from a Pennsylvania correctional facility; an angry crowd carrying a wounded youth during clashes with Israeli troops in Gaza.
But the AP was also there when the world stopped, at least for a moment. President Donald Trump’s hands grasp instructions on what to say to participants at a meeting on school shootings (“I hear you”). Dressed entirely in red, the Queen of Soul rests in her coffin. And girls weep in the aftermath of the rampage at a Pittsburgh synagogue that left 11 dead and countless hearts broken.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, left, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in cross the military demarcation line at the border village of Panmunjom in Demilitarized Zone on April 27, 2018. (Korea Summit Press Pool via AP)Lava from the Kilauea volcano flows near the Puna Geothermal Venture power plant in Pahoa, Hawaii, on June 10, 2018. (AP Photo/L.E. Baskow)Members of a migrant caravan bound for the United States rest on a road between the Mexican states of Chiapas and Oaxaca after federal police briefly blocked them outside the town of Arriaga, on Oct. 27, 2018. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)World leaders, from left, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Morocco’s Prince Moulay Hassan, Moroccan King Mohammed VI, U.S. first lady Melania Trump, U.S. President Donald Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Australian Governor-General Peter Cosgrove attend a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris as part of the commemorations marking the 100th anniversary of the Nov. 11, 1918, armistice, which ended World War I, on Sunday, Nov. 11, 2018. (Ludovic Marin/Pool Photo via AP)Lava flows down the slopes of the Mayon volcano in the Philippines, seen from Legazpi city, 340 kilometers (210 miles) southeast of Manila, on Jan. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Dan Amaranto)A plane drops fire retardant behind homes along McVicker Canyon Park Road in Lake Elsinore, Calif., as the Holy Fire burned near homes on Aug. 8, 2018. (Mark Rightmire/The Orange County Register via AP)Hessah al-Ajaji drives her car down busy Tahlia Street after midnight for the first time in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh on June 24, 2018, just minutes after the world’s last remaining ban on women driving was lifted. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)Embers fly above a firefighter hustling to control a backfire as the Delta Fire burns in the California’s Shasta-Trinity National Forest on Sept. 6, 2018. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)A zoo worker plays with a 5-month-old panda at the Malaysia Zoo in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on May 26, 2018. The female panda, which has not yet been named, is the second offspring of giant pandas Liang Liang and Xing Xing, who have been on a 10-year loan to Malaysia from China since 2014. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)Surface to air missile fire lights up the sky over Damascus at the U.S. launches an attack on Syria early on April 14, 2018. U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the airstrikes in retaliation for Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
