Lasting impressions 2023: See the year's most memorable photos for lohud's photographers
A news photographer's job description takes it all in. The fire and the shelter where the displaced try to make sense of losing everything. The protest and the emotion that drove people into the streets. The football game and the drama on both sides of the final score. They can be in a courtroom to chronicle a trial and its victims. Or at the opening of a new restaurant. They can be at the polls on election day or at a press conference to announce a politician's new campaign or their fall from grace. They show readers, one exposure at a time, what it's like to live here, now. Each December our photographers look back over their portfolios to choose an image that will stay with them. Here are this year's images and the stories behind each.
Frank Becerra Jr. | A horse-country horse stuck in the mud
The 2023 image that stays with me might seem unusual: a horse-country horse stuck in the mud. On Jan. 17, people from all walks of life huddled around a horse named Nico in the woods off Hardscrabble Road in North Salem. Croton Falls firefighters were there, with the Westchester and Putnam Technical Rescue Teams and a local vet whose sedative calmed the stuck horse down. For more than two hours, they tried straps and backboards to break the suction that held Nico to the muck. Eventually, he was freed and pulled onto a makeshift plywood stretcher. Rescuers had just begun the task of dragging him the half-mile out of the woods when Nico, as if in gratitude to save them the effort, stood and walked out under his own power.
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Tania Savayan | Meeting Dobbs Ferry dragons
When education reporter Diana Dombrowski and I collaborated on a story about Social and Emotional Learning, we met students identifying and managing their emotions through practice baked into the culture of schools, from classrooms to playgrounds. They responded to others respectfully and practiced mindfulness, learning to navigate stressful situations. We watched first-graders at Springhurst Elementary School in Dobbs Ferry learn that sometimes the best way to relax is to breathe like a dragon. They took deep breaths in and exhaled big, opening their eyes and mouths as wide as they could and sticking out their fire-breathing tongues. I love the energy in this photograph. They were completely engaged. It's inspiring to see them respond to this relaxation technique that most people don't usually learn until later in life, if ever.
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Seth Harrison | Shouting past each other
The story that continues to demand our attention is the war between Israel and Hamas and its ramifications echoing worldwide. In this country, we are grappling with antisemitism and Islamophobia, with two sides of the conflict shouting past each other. Ten days after the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas terrorists and Israel's deadly response, I covered a protest in Washington Square Park in New York City where hundreds of pro-Palestinian supporters faced off against those backing Israel. This image captures the intensity of emotions that both sides are exhibiting, the anger and the anguish with no sign of finding common ground and no promise that the vitriol and dangerous rhetoric will subside.
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Peter Carr | Best seat in the house
Little Hector Gonzalez had a great perch for the town of Clarkstown fireworks show at Felix Festa Middle School in West Nyack on June 29, 2023: He sat on the shoulders of his great-grandfather, Gregory Pereira of New City. It was just dark enough for fireworks when the show started, with a little twilight left, but most of the light in this image is the flash of the fireworks illuminating the ground and outlining Hector's face. I like this photo, too, because it reminds me of what a small world it is. In the dark I didn't realize that I had met Gregory and his family months before, photographing him for a story about the red tape he faced trying to start one of the first cannabis stores in Rockland.
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John Meore | Smoke from a distant fire
In a year of thousands of images, the one that lingers from 2023 takes me back to June, when smoke from Canadian wildfires turned meteorologists into air-quality monitors, and we could see the air we breathed. Earlier in the day I took this image, I had photographed pickle-ball players who were unfazed by the smoke. But within hours, things took a dramatic turn — as they tended to in those smoky summer weeks. The sky darkened, the color changed. Driving onto the Piermont Pier to get an image of the Gov. Mario Cuomo Bridge though the haze, things got darker still. It was like driving onto a post-apocalyptic movie set. Those on the pier all seemed to question what they were seeing, myself included. I spotted this man pointing his cellphone at the sun, which was high in the sky but was rendered an orange-yellow disk behind the smoke's yellow haze.
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Mark Vergari | Americana on Hudson
My favorite photo of 2023 was a real throwback. This summer, Dobbs Ferry marked its 150th anniversary with live music, a trivia pub crawl and a waterfront carnival, an ice-cream party and fireworks. On July 2 came the return of an event not held in the village since 1973: the Soap Box Derby. In this slice of Americana, racers guided their homemade vehicles down Main Street — each having four wheels and a steering wheel with the only power being the gravity of the hill from Cedar Street to a line of hay bales down near Elm Street. There were racers dedicated to the Yankees, to the Pink Panther, to the Dobbs Ferry Eagles, to the police department. One, called the Banana Bob 6000, featured oversized bananas on both sides. One, called Bad Breaking, was made to look like Walter White's Winnebago from "Breaking Bad." I love living in Westchester County where we can experience the big cities like Yonkers and small town villages like Dobbs Ferry.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: See the lohud photo staff's most memorable photos of 2023
