AP’s Top 10 photos of 2012

The AP’s award-winning team of hundreds of staff photographers, freelancers and photo editors sends out some 3,000 photos every 24 hours - over 1 million photos a year - to our subscribers around the globe.

How then to sum up an entire year of news in just 10 photos? The very notion is daunting.

Photo editing is a process of comparison and selection. It involves aesthetics and storytelling and impact and memory.

In the end, I chose 10 representative photos, some from the biggest stories of 2012, some for their eye-catching content (and then a broader edit of some 150 news photos to try to capture almost everything else).

In the 10, we see grief over the loss of children in Colorado and Syria. We see children being led to safety from the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. We see a fleet of emblematic New York taxis partially submerged after super storm Sandy. We see President Obama and Mitt Romney facing off in debate. A man sets himself alight in India to protest the situation in Tibet. We also see amazing things; A man leaps from a balloon 38 kilometers (24 miles) above the earth’s surface, and a cruise ship floats on its side after running aground of the coast off Italy. A bear falls out of a tree after being tranquilized, and a high-speed underwater camera captures a swimmer plunging into the water at the London Olympics.

The choice of these photos is meant only to represent the broader spectrum of human experiences captured in the other images. Every experience is, in some way, a valid one.

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Santiago Lyon is the Director of Photography at the Associated Press