Category: Portfolios & Galleries

Happy New Year! Thank you for sharing your favorite photographs and being part of our community. A HUGE thank you to Emily Wall and Kassandra Eller for helping me upload hundreds and hundreds of photographs. We hope 2024 will be a year of creativity, joy, friendship, and love. We appreciate your support and readership over the last 18 years. Raising a toast to the Lenscratch Staff and all the contributors who work hard to give back to this amazing community. Now, stay in bed with a cup of coffee, and scroll away. There are 14 pages to get through.

Every year, our photo editors try to capture the best photojournalism in one intense presentation. The Year in Pictures is a way to commemorate the big news events from January to December: the ones that traumatized us — and there are many of those — mixed in with some moments of bliss.

Beginning as a subgroup of members on Flickr, Burn My Eye Collective brought together photographers who had a passion for street photography and a desire for more collaboration and interaction with each other. Since its conception, this collective has found its footing and provides members a chance to curate series and provide constructive feedback in a safe space

Among many other powerful documentary photographs this year are David Guttenfelder’s stark silhouette of soldiers on a wooded battlefield in Ukraine; Philip Montgomery’s instantly iconic image of United Auto Workers strikers in Toledo, Ohio; and Supranav Dash’s ingenious juxtaposition of a wizened goatherd and his flock ambling along a fence, behind which looms a vast sheet of solar panels in the Pavagada Ultra Mega Solar Park, in southern India. Carolyn Drake, who accompanied Paige Williams to Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair, captured the legacy of a hundred and thirty-four years of history in her photograph of a sea of white faces in the fairground stands, ensconced in a joyful tradition that has roots in the state’s segregationist past.