Maybe because the past 12 months have felt more like a decade, it’s already become a popular bit of revisionist history to describe 2020 as a normal year that suddenly went off the rails when pandemic shutdowns took hold and a string of police killings set off widespread racial justice protests. But the truth is 2020 was never going to be ordinary: it started with presidential impeachment proceedings and was always destined to end with a historically contentious general election. Still, no one could have predicted the harrowing months in between. Through all of it, ALM photographers were there to document these profound events, telling the human stories on the ground as history was being made in real time.
