After a dramatic start to 2020, these photos capture a rapidly changing world

Looking back at the first months of this year, people can perhaps point to the time before and after the pandemic fundamentally changed their lives. Many of our selected images of spring also reflect that divide.

Earlier pictures show community, how we as humans tend to gather for every reason imaginable: to communally preen for the perfect tan on a Rio rooftop, embrace in a dance during Mardi Gras, or commemorate the priceless friendships and freedom of youth in prom photos near the U.S.-Mexico border.

And then suddenly community is a source no longer of joy but of fear. For photographer Newsha Tavakolian in Iran, what should have been a large gathering to mourn the anniversary of her father’s death becomes an eerily quiet exercise with her sister of laying hands on his grave, grief and love pulsing through their plastic gloves. The human need for connection undaunted, but curtailed.

"In Iran, as a custom, we kneel next to the grave. We touch it with one hand while we send a prayer. As I was doing this—touching my father's tombstone, now with gloves—I realized how many things had changed since the day he died," says Tavakolian. "My father was always a positive person. He would often say, ‘This too shall pass.’ At that moment I was hoping he was right.”