As the US confronted intensifying climate threats, widening inequality, and political and economic turmoil, the Guardian called on photojournalists across the country to document both the hardships and the resilience of their communities over the past year.
These images and stories go beyond breaking news alerts, capturing the truths and complex lives of individuals and groups. They tell the stories of caregivers, survivors of gun violence, families forced to leave their homes due to political threats, the rapid growth of datacenters, and advocates working to protect democratic processes.
Together, this collection of top images published in 2025 offers a layered portrait of the nation.
Photograph: Camille Farrah Lenain/The Guardian
Edith Langford, PhD, survived being shot and nearly paralyzed at the age of nine. Despite all odds, she recovered and learned to walk again. Now 73, she is a therapist and occasional adjunct professor, currently working on a memoir about trauma and thriving.
Photograph: Aaron Agosto/The Guardian
In the Blackfeet Nation of northern Montana, the remote location and management by the federal government have made food access a challenge. In response, dedicated community members and local non-profits are helping students explore traditional practices alongside modern science to make food sovereignty a reality.
Photograph: Ahmed Gaber/The Guardian
Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organiser, reflects on exile and liberation after his release from ICE detention in June. His grandparents survived the Nakba and he fled Assad’s Syria. Khalil is no stranger to political persecution, but not even Trump’s crackdown can silence him.
Photograph: Celeste Sloman/The Guardian
Mike Thomas and his family are part of a small movement of Americans who believe that the modern world is broken – and that the solution lies not in economic equality or social progressivism, but in an older, stricter family order. The “trad” (traditionalist) movement coincides with a time of extraordinary political assault on women’s rights in the US and a cultural backlash against decades of feminist consensus. At its most militant, it is intertwined with far-right political projects.
Photograph: Harmon Li/@harmonli
John Davis, a 16-year Republican lawmaker, Texas rancher and Trump supporter, has strong conservative credentials. However, he’s horrified by his party’s attack on clean energy, vital to rural areas. Davis allowed seven wind turbines to be situated on his ranch and has seen the income provide opportunities not only for his family but also his local community in what is one of the poorest counties in Texas.
Photograph: Jeffery A Salter/The Guardian
LaToya Ratlief, a native of Palm Beach county, Florida, was shot in the head with a rubber bullet by a Fort Lauderdale cop during a 2020 protest against the murder of George Floyd. She finally reached the end of a tumultuous, four-year settlement process, but the emotional wounds still linger for her and some protesters five years after the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
Photograph: Bridget Bennett/The Guardian
Horses graze at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center in Storey county, Nevada, home to the largest datacenter in the US, built by the company Switch. Tech giants such as Google and Microsoft have also purchased land here and are constructing massive facilities. A separate Apple datacenter complex is just down the road and a Tesla “gigafactory” is also a resident. As datacenters continue to multiply in communities around the world – from Frankfurt to Johannesburg – AI’s thirst for power and water shows no signs of letting up.
Photograph: Ashley Peña/The Guardian
K’Sisay Sadiki, daughter of Black Panther parents, Kamau Sadiki and Pamela Hanna, holding a play bird as she talks about her father and freedom. The Black Panthers shook America awake before the party was eviscerated by the US government. Their children paid a steep price, but also emerged with unassailable pride and burning lessons for today.
Photograph: Zaydee Sanchez/The Guardian
Christine Valenciana’s mother’s family was among those separated during the Great Depression, when nearly 2 million Mexican Americans were forced from their homes and deported. When she watched footage of armed, masked ICE agents in unmarked vehicles snatching people off the streets across southern California this summer, it recalled a familiar time.
Photograph: Paul Ratje/The Guardian
Mazyouna Damoo, 13, who lost part of her face in an Israeli missile strike in Gaza, with her little sister Tala, five, in El Paso, Texas, where she has been receiving treatment. The young teenager’s treatment is a rare story of hope from the two-year war in Gaza. Since the US-brokered ceasefire was announced on 10 October, Israeli forces have killed more than 360 Palestinians in Gaza; according to a UN official, at least 70 are children.
Photograph: September Dawn Bottoms/The Guardian
The Rev Shannon Fleck at the Oklahoma History Center, in front of the capitol in Oklahoma City in February. Fleck and a coalition of faith leaders in Oklahoma have launched initiatives to offer religious Oklahomans an alternative to the ultraconservative and anti-LGBTQ+ theology that has come to characterize many churches in the state.
Photograph: Julius Constantine Motal/The Guardian
People embrace each other during a Yizkor prayer service on Yom Kippur in Brooklyn, New York. Two years after the 7 October massacre and the onset of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, American Jewry has been profoundly transformed.
Photograph: Stephanie Strasburg/The Guardian
Homes line the hills across from the Edgar Thomson steel mill in Braddock, in the Allegheny valley, in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in April. Donald Trump imposed 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum in March, but the tariffs Trump claims will bring back the glory of rust-belt towns like this caused chaos for thousands of businesses across the region.
Photograph: Alexandra Isabella/The Guardian
Firefighter Sal Almanza’s calloused hands at the Eaton fire base camp in Pasadena, California, on 16 January. People serving out their prison terms as firefighters formed an integral part of the response to the devastating LA wildfires.
Photograph: Ashley Peña/The Guardian
Black Panther cub Alprentice Davis, son of Thelma Davis from the Queens, New York, chapter of the Panthers, and Robert Bay, a top adviser to Huey P Newton in Oakland. In Davis’s memoir, Urchin Society: Memories of a Black Panther Cub, he ponders what would have happened if the government, instead of pummeling the party to the point of extinction, had worked with them.
Photograph: Amanda Lucier/The Guardian
Christy Sexton, right, is comforted by another volunteer worker, Alan, at Hawthorne Park. Christy had just returned from viewing the body of her son Mike, who died of a fentanyl overdose. While Oregon’s new policy turning low-level drug possession into a more serious crime has appeared to reduce visible drug use in some public spaces, unhoused people, who have been most affected by the police response, say it has exacerbated their struggles.
Photograph: Aaron Agosto/The Guardian
William Brown, who was laid off as a wildland firefighter during a slow fire year, and his dog, Princess, in Kalispell, Montana. Brown parks his camper at a nearby storage lot and relies on the Flathead Warming Center for a place to stay overnight. The city tried to shut down the center as local officials have taken a strikingly punitive approach to unhoused residents in a city where house prices have more than doubled in the past five years, rents have rocketed, the cost of living has gone up sharply, and mental health services have been slashed, leading to a crisis on the streets.
Photograph: Zaydee Sanchez/The Guardian
Volunteers from the Pasadena Community Job Center cleaned an apartment in Altadena, California, in March. Many of the thousands of workers involved in clearing debris from the mega-fires in Altadena and the Palisades, which killed 30 people and destroyed about 16,000 homes, are from immigrant backgrounds. Advocates say these workers are especially vulnerable while working in potentially hazardous conditions.
Photograph: Isabel Miranda/The Guardian
Children eat lunch at Mis Conejitos childcare center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The state, which has long ranked worst in the US for child wellbeing, became the first and only in the country to offer free childcare to a majority of families.
Photograph: Alexandra Lopez/The Guardian
Eli, left, with his mother, Emily. Eli is one of nearly 3,000 patients who learned in June they would be abruptly losing their healthcare at CHLA, one of the largest and most prominent centers in the nation to treat trans kids. Affected youth increasingly spoke out and organized demonstrations to call for the healthcare to be restored.
Photograph: Julien James/The Guardian
Members of a men’s mental health group bow their heads in prayer as co-moderator Wayne Bennett leads a moment of reflection in Los Angeles’s Leimert Park neighborhood. The bi-monthly group, founded by Desmond Carter, gives Black men a safe space to share, reflect and support each other.
Photograph: Greta Rybus/The Guardian
Julie Briggs, Kenna Dufresne and Jason Kenney pack up food at the end of the No Greater Love food pantry’s open hours in Belfast, Maine, two hours north of Portland. No Greater Love strained to serve hungry patrons in Maine, New England’s most food-insecure state. Then they lost more than 1,000lb of federally funded goods.
Photograph: Henry O Head/The Guardian
Nancy Morrell, a live-in caregiver in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, said the push for Medicaid cuts had already affected her family. In April 2025, she was notified that the hours that Medicaid would cover for her care of her sister Carolyn, with cerebral palsy, would be reduced by 75 a month despite no changes in her care needs.
Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian
Karine Jean-Pierre, who served as White House press secretary for two and a half years under the presidency of Joe Biden in Washington DC, in October. Jean-Pierre explains in her new memoir, Independent why she decided to leave the Democratic party after two decades.
Photograph: Jordan Gale/The Guardian
Trump supporters donned ponchos outside the Trump victory rally at the Capital One Arena in Washington DC, in January. Preparations for the 60th presidential inauguration reflected a nation poised and polarized between hope and fear.
Photograph: Alana Perino/The Guardian
Kristy Lewis, a climate scientist, moved from Florida to Rhode Island in 2023 to escape political attacks on science led by the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. The relocation cost her $14,000 and affected her academic progress. This year, she received a letter from the Trump administration stating that two federal grants worth $1.5m for offshore wind energy research, which she had already received, had been canceled. Lewis fled Florida to escape the attack on her science. Now there is nowhere left to hide.
Photograph: Ash Adams/The Guardian
Volunteers load naloxone kits on to an Anchorage health department truck in Alaska, where overdose deaths declined slower than nationally. Harm Reduction is both community work and philosophy–practitioners believe helping people reduce risk is more realistic than expecting abstinence.
