In a world of endless distraction, the battle for attention has become a defining contest of our era.

In this war, photographers are seasoned veterans. Long before the rest of us were forced to sift through social media posts, news alerts and email notifications, they had the daunting task of editing down the chaos and energy of the physical world into a single image or series of images. Out of infinite possibility – myriad angles and objects and subjects – they choose to direct their lens in a conscious way to tell a particular story.

In doing so, they can make their audiences see the world anew.

Clark University’s Janette Greenwood wrote about photographer William Bullard, whose early-20th century portraits of Black families from Worcester, Massachusetts, were recently discovered. The images, which depict the city’s Black families as ordinary, upstanding Americans, were a quiet form of protest: In an era when degrading images of Black Americans pervaded nearly every aspect of popular culture, Greenwood explains how Bullard’s portraits “defy nearly every stereotype of the dysfunctional Black family.”

Ron Tarver spent years photographing people largely ignored in mythic depictions of the American West: Black cowboys. He didn’t just depict garden variety cattle herders, either; he documented urban cowboys who operated stables out of inner-city Philadelphia – members of clubs like the Western Wranglers and the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club. When he first published the photographs in The Philadelphia Inquirer, readers were stunned.

“Some wrote, ‘There’s no such thing as Black cowboys.‘ They actually said that. I’m like, ‘These pictures prove that! I’m not making this up!’ They were just amazed that Black people could be cowboys,” Tarver told me in an interview.

In the work of photographer Shannon Taggart, University of Maryland, Baltimore County curator Beth Saunders sees a connection to the disruptions and tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic. For 20 years, Taggart has photographed the adherents of spiritualism, a belief system centered on communication with the dead. To Saunders, it’s no coincidence that people are looking for answers in spiritualism – along with fortunetelling, tarot card readings, conspiracy theories and astrology – in our age of anxiety.

“Taggart’s photographs,” Saunders writes, “recover the marginalized history of spiritualism at a moment when the religion feels once again on the verge of a resurgence.”

I’ve also included three of the Arts and Culture section’s most popular articles from the past year: how a team of musicologists and experts in artificial intelligence completed Beethoven’s unfinished 10th symphony, the history of people living in airports and a study finding that happiness is highest among adults in their 30s.