Throughout 2018, TIME’s photo editors set aside images that, amid a relentless news cycle, made us pause. By November, we had a stockpile of a few thousand pictures, culled down from the millions we had collectively seen since January. Over the course of a few weeks, and after adding in even more, we whittled that group down to 100 images that defined the year. In the days since, we knocked it down to 10 — an unranked selection that appears below.
