Photos

Every day, Bloomberg photographers capture hundreds of images to illustrate the world’s top business and financial news stories. And every year, we ask our team of editors and photographers to weed through hundreds of thousands of images to select the strongest photos — the ones that illustrated the unillustratable, told a story in a single frame and helped Bloomberg and other news outlets around the world to tell the most important stories of 2014.

And then we asked the team to do the impossible — pick a favorite.

Here’s the pick from Natasha Cholerton-Brown, Managing Editor for the Global Visual Media Team:

Rightly or wrongly I tend to do these things on gut, and that is precisely how my image choice came about here. I tried testing myself, tried to talk myself out of it just to double and triple check I wasn’t being too hasty, but every time I did that, there it was again…still in my head.

I caveat my seemingly ‘easy’ choice by saying, year on year I am totally blown away by our Best of the Year selections and it actually gets progressively harder to go through this process. It spurs me into thinking that it should be a quarterly event as it becomes a rare time when we really are forced to stop, look, discuss, analyze, look again…and engage in some ‘very’ healthy arguments.

For me this image has a beautiful painterly, Lowryesque quality about it. There is an abundance of detail and so much activity captured, yet it is very still and somber at the same time. The fact that it is far from the best quality technically is totally irrelevant. The muted, overcast and smoke filled sky adds depth and texture to the frame, while the gold leaf detail on the central column and pillars jumps off the screen in stark contrast, almost asking the viewer to visualize the before and after.

Without wanting to trivialize the gravity of the scene captured or belittle the broader news story associated with the coverage, it reminds me of a Where’s Waldo scene. It leaves me searching for the stories of the people seen — desperately hunting for more information, wanting people to turn around, wanting to know what is happening inside the blown out building on the right, wanting to be able to have control over a 360 degree view of the scene, to zoom in and out.

It leaves me wondering how life continues in the buildings seen in the distance, what is happening in the surrounding streets, wondering what that scene looks like today and how it will regenerate in future. I could honestly go on, that is how much of an impact the image has had on me. I find myself thinking about it at odd times throughout the day, another reason why I could not talk myself out of the image choice! So there, in slightly more than a nutshell, it is — my best of the best of 2014.

See the full collection of photos from the 2014 Best of the Year collection.