Five months after Salman Rushdie suffered a near-fatal stabbing during an event at the Chautauqua Institution, in western New York, in August, 2022, he sat for a photo portrait by Richard Burbridge. In the resulting picture, which accompanied David Remnick’s intimate, forensic Profile of the author in this magazine, Rushdie—scars visible, one lens of his glasses blacked out to conceal his damaged right eye—gazes straight into the camera with a knowing glint in his good eye and a whisper of a smile. He looks not quite defiant but in waiting, as if to casually announce, Whatever else you’ve got for me, I’m ready—an apt embodiment of Remnick’s observation that, in the decades since the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, of Iran, issued a fatwa against Rushdie, in 1989, “He refused to be terrorized.”

From “The Defiance of Salman Rushdie,” by David Remnick.Photograph by Richard Burbridge for The New Yorker

In early June, when smoke from Canadian wildfires engulfed New York City in an otherworldly orange haze, Clark Hodgin set out to capture the eerie scene, for Carolyn Kormann’s first-person dispatch. Hodgin’s collection of uncannily beautiful images of iconic spots includes one in Central Park, where kids who have taken to the irresistible boulders appear frozen in amber, a cell phone in hand, backpacks and all. The image underlines the strangeness of that dystopian moment, which was surreal and oddly beautiful (as long as you didn’t inhale) yet deeply foreboding, especially for our youth, who are inheriting a world increasingly altered by climate change.

For a portrait of the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, Mark Peterson was denied his request to ride along with the Mayor—so he improvised and caught Adams as he swapped out his suit jacket from a makeshift closet in an S.U.V. The picture, which shows Adams flashing a smile for a passerby, serves as a superb entrée to Ian Parker’s Profile, which begins, “Mayor Eric Adams’s exuberant self-regard stops just short of biceps-kissing.” 

From “Trying to Breathe in a City of Smoke,” by Carolyn Kormann.Photograph by Clark Hodgin for The New Yorker

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.

From “Joyce Carol Oates’s Relentless, Prolific Search for a Self,” by Rachel Aviv.Photograph by Andrea Modica for The New Yorker

Remarkable portraits this year include Stephen Ross Goldstein’s stunning picture of the comedian Sarah Silverman, for an interview with Carrie Battan, taken just weeks after Silverman’s stepmother and father had both died: a queen of comedy who has dropped her beloved mode of mirthful incredulity, staring directly into the camera, her visible grief contained. The visual artist Shikeith turns a portrait of the painter Kehinde Wiley into something of a rapturous artwork in itself, depicting Wiley as the loving creator of both a cacophony of lush color on his palette and, in counterpoint, the delicate, precise brushstrokes of a painting in progress. Elizabeth Renstrom pinpoints Kate Berlant’s inner Kate, the alter ego that the comedian both explores and sends up in her hilarious performances. Rahim Fortune gives Samuel R. Delaney, the polymathic sci-fi author and chronicler of gay life, an aptly blurry-edged frame.

Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari created a cheeky portfolio to accompany Rachel Syme’s piece on the American designer Thom Browne. To evoke the ethos of Browne’s working environment—where all employees wear a requisite shrunken gray suit, known as “uniform”—the artists conducted a shoot in Browne’s New York offices, with Browne’s real employees receiving instruction from a model in a square top hat and fur: high fashion one step ahead and leading the way for the suits.