The skateboarders of Bolivia's Imilla Skate do their heel flips and backslides in polleras — colorful, layered skirts worn by the country's Indigenous Aymara and Quechua population. "By skating in polleras, we want to show that girls and women can do anything, no matter how you look or how people see you," says Daniela Santiváñez, who founded the group with two friends in 2019.
A picture, they say, is worth 1,000 words. So we will try to use as few words as possible in this introduction to a sampling of our favorite photo posts of 2024.
This year's round up includes dramatic drone images of the world's "foodscapes," an intimate look at families striving to provide healthy meals for their kids and exuberant Bolivian women skateboarding in their traditional bowler hats.
Sope Adelaja for NPR
Toyin Salami of Lagos, Nigeria, with her 4-year-old daughter, Kudirat. Her husband, Saheed, tends to two of their other children. "It's hard to get food, let alone nutritious food," she says.
At a one-day workshop run by the Care School for Men in Bogotá, Colombia, male medical students at Sanitas University learn how to cradle a baby. This class of participants consists of medical students, but the usual enrollees are dads of all types.
Paramedic Papinki Lebelo waits for a police escort before responding to an emergency call-out a Cape Town neighborhood. Due to a rise in attacks on paramedics, ambulance crews in large parts of the city will only go out when they have a police escort.
The African nation of Mauritania was a land of pastoral nomads when it gained independence from France in 1960, but it has since become a nation of fishermen as well, with hundreds of pirogues lining the beach of the capital of Nouakchott.
The now-demolished Agbogbloshie Scrapyard in Accra, Ghana, once received 250,000 tons of electronic waste each year, making it the world’s largest electronic waste dump.
Ben de la Cruz is an award-winning documentary video producer and multimedia journalist. He is currently a senior visuals editor. In addition to overseeing the multimedia coverage of NPR's global health and development, his responsibilities include working on news products for emerging platforms including Amazon's and Google's smart screens. He is also part of a team developing a new way of thinking about how NPR can collaborate and engage with our audience as well as photographers, filmmakers, illustrators, animators, and graphic designers to build new visual storytelling avenues on NPR's website, social media platforms, and through live events.
