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The World Through a Lens

Helping to Reveal a Still-Shuttered World

Our weekly photo essay series offered readers a glimpse of distant places and cultures that, for a second straight year, remained largely inaccessible.

By Stephen Hiltner and Phaedra Brown

In March 2020, as lockdowns fell into place worldwide, The Times’s Travel desk launched a new visual series to help readers cope with their confinement. We called it The World Through a Lens — and, frankly, we didn’t expect it to last this long.

But as the weeks turned into months, and the months into years, we’ve continued publishing photo essays each Monday morning, carrying you — virtually — from the islands of Maine to the synagogues of Myanmar, and nearly 100 other places in between.

We hope the series has offered you a little solace and a little distraction throughout the pandemic — and perhaps a chance to immerse yourself, if momentarily, in a distant place or culture that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Below are some of our favorite World Through a Lens essays from the past year. (You can browse the full archive here.)

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From its western terminus in Anchorage, the Glenn Highway skirts the northern edge of the Chugach Mountains — seen here behind the Matanuska River — and provides ample glacier vistas along the way to the town of McCarthy.Credit...Christopher Miller for The New York Times

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