(See more: Barack Obama, 2012 Person of the Year )

As managing editor Rick Stengel writes in his editor’s letter, “We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America.” To capture that magnitude, TIME commissioned Kander, whose signature style is defined by his exquisite lighting and almost painterly touch, to make a historic cover. The last time he photographed the President was in 2009 for The New York Times Magazine.

Callie Shell for TIME

President Barack Obama with TIME's Director of Photography, Kira Pollack, during the photo shoot in the Diplomatic Room of the White House on Dec. 12, 2012.

“When photographing such a high profile individual, it’s a huge challenge to not let their high profile take over the process,” Kander says. “I wanted to make a meaningful photograph that reflected pause in a person’s life and reflect his humanity.”

—Kira Pollack, Director of Photography

(Related: 48 Hours with President Obama by Callie Shell )

The most notable is New York Magazine’s magnificent cover by photographer Iwan Baan of a half blacked-out Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy. It’s instantly iconic and will become one of the greatest covers of all time. In the mix is also W‘s stunning fashion cover image of Marion Cotillard, ESPN‘s high-concept “Fantasy Football” cover, depicting an NFL player in a magical forest with a unicorn, and a photojournalistic cover, the Economist’s powerful image documenting the personal toll of the conflict in Gaza.

We also decided to include two covers in the mix that were striking photo-based illustrations. An aged Obama on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek as well as a thoughtful commission by the New York Times Magazine for the visual artist Idris Kahn to reinterpret an iconic landmark on their London-themed cover.

A great cover is always a collaborative effort. To caption each of our selected covers, we spoke to a mix of editors, photo directors, art directors and photographers who took part during different stages of the creative process. In our selection, we refrained from choosing any TIME covers, though if we were to choose one, it would be Martin Schoeller’s arresting image of a mother breast-feeding her 4-year-old son, “Are You Mom Enough?”

—Kira Pollack, Director of Photography

Nonetheless, a great photograph will rise above all the others. The ten photographs we present here are the pictures that moved us most in 2012. They all deliver a strong emotional impact — whether they show a child mourning his father who was killed by a sniper in Syria (slide #3); a heartbreaking scene in a Gaza City morgue (slide #1); a haunting landscape of New Jersey coastline after Hurricane Sandy, a rollercoaster submerged under the tide (slide #2); or a rare glimpse of President Obama moments before he goes out on stage during a campaign rally (slide #9). We spoke to each of the photographers about their images, and their words provide the captions here.

Over the past several days, we’ve unveiled TIME’s Best Photojournalism and Best Portraits of the Year galleries on LightBox. And in the next three weeks, we will be rolling out even more end-of-year features: the Most Surprising Pictures of the Year; the Best Photo Books of the Year; the Top 10 Photographic Magazine Covers of the Year and other compelling galleries. We will also recognize TIME’s choice for the Best Wire Photographer of the Year. Senior photo editor Phil Bicker is curating many of these galleries with help from the photo team at TIME. His discerning eye has been responsible for the curation of TIME’s Pictures of the Week throughout the year, galleries that regularly present the best of the week’s images, with surprising and sometimes offbeat takes on the news.  We will round off the year on December 31 with our second-annual “365: Year in Pictures,” a comprehensive look at the strongest picture of every day of 2012.

—Kira Pollack, Director of Photography

Kathy Ryan, the Director of Photography at The New York Times Magazine, is famous for cross-assigning—hiring a war photographer to shoot celebrities, or commissioning a large-format landscape photographer to capture news close up. In 2008, Ryan asked photojournalist Paolo Pellegrin to create the Times Magazine’s annual Great Performances portfolio, which offered an intimate look at celebrities who are often highly controlled by publicists. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Kathy’s news instincts led her to look into a larger, more global view of refugee camps. She sent Simon Norfolk, a large format, landscape photographer, to record displaced people in three different countries with his 8×10 camera. Any number of photojournalists could have executed that assignment, but Simon’s unique eye found incredible detail in each of those scenes, and distinguished the work from other news pictures.

There’s always a risk in cross-assigning that way, and Kathy’s success in getting provocative but thoughtful pictures is a testament to her remarkable vision. But she’s still a journalist at heart, and aims to portray the world in a surprising way for the viewer. Which is why her more straight-forward, documentary-style commissions are equally as remarkable. Lynsey Addario’s timeless picture of soldiers carrying out their dead comrade after an ambush in Afghanistan in 2008, James Nachtwey’s image of a screaming Romanian child in a dilapidated crib from 1990, Sebastian Salgado’s photograph of Kuwaiti workers installing a new wellhead in 1991—these all stand as some of the greatest photojournalistic work in magazine history.

Kira Pollack

Kathy Ryan with the photographer Nadav Kander on the set of Obama's People.

Kathy’s editing style is impeccable. Her nuanced eye leads her to always find the heartbeat in each frame, pulling out incredible compositions and revealing dramatic tension in the image. One of her great strengths—and what I learned most from her during my 11 years at The Magazine—is how thoroughly she edits. I recall her once going through 50-some odd rolls of photojournalist Gilles Peress’ contact sheets. There are 36 frames per roll, which would mean 1,800 frames. I’ve always been impressed by her ability to handle that kind of volume and cut right to the chase by editing to the 10 or 15 best frames, which would eventually get boiled down into an even tighter edit for the magazine.

This book is a window into all aspects of Kathy’s vision. Almost every photograph has a backstory from the photographer, and often from other editors and Kathy herself, where she so thoughtfully articulates the story behind each picture. At the end of the book are all the tearsheets, so you can see the original context in which the pictures ran.

A lot of editors on Kathy’s level have a vision that evolves to a certain point and then stays there. Kathy continues to evolve. She’s gone through different phases of what inspires her, and she constantly grows as an editor.  On September 26, The New York Times Magazine was awarded a News and Documentary Emmy for her incredible production with Sølve Sundsbø, “Fourteen Actors Acting”— a first for the Magazine and a fitting tribute to her ever expanding repertoire.

The New York Times Magazine Photographs, edited by Kathy Ryan is published by Aperture. It features more than four hundred images, organized into five sections: Portraits, Documentary, Photo-Illustration, Style and Projects published in The Magazine over the last three decades.

Peter’s photographs reveal a deep framework of intellectual and emotional layering that defines his distinctive and original signature. In last night’s video presentation of his work at the Infinity Awards ceremony, Peter stated that “Good work comes from humility, not presumption.” It is this innate perspective that reveals deep meaning and sensitivity in his pictures, whether documenting soldiers at war and at home, the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill or the poignant moments of daily life.

His photographic journey gained focus in 2006, when, at the age of 25, Peter set off on the first of four trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. The photographs he produced were eventually published in his first book, 2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die. Peter, writing in the prologue, describes the challenges of documenting the conflicted nature of war:

“I wanted to make pictures that reflected my complex and often contradictory experiences, where the line was continuously blurred between perpetrator and victim, between hero and villain.”

Aside from the truly remarkable photographs, the book’s heartbeat resonates in Peter’s writing. It is rare that a photographer can articulate so thoughtfully in words a layer not immediately evident in the pictures — a layer that adds deeper meaning to the work. Readers are presented with a series of pictures and text that underscore the complexities and confusion of war by an author coming of age with the soldiers he is photographing.

“A number of strays hung around Patrol Base California, waiting for food and company. Usually the soldiers welcomed them. But I was told that a few weeks earlier, when one of the dogs urinated on a soldier’s cot, he and his buddies shot the dog to pieces.” Peter van Agtmael—Magnum

Sergeant Russell in VPB California, a small U.S. outpost in the Pech Valley. Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 2007.

Although many of his pictures reveal a personal awareness for the human condition, Peter strives for even greater empathy. ”I wish these pictures could convey more of what I experienced. They are only my interpretation, and an agonizingly limited one, a shred of all that has been utterly, unfathomably lost,” he states.

Peter is a regular contributor to both TIME and LightBox. Last spring, TIME commissioned Peter to document the journey of a soldier killed in action in Afghanistan as he traveled to his final resting place. The most poignant photograph was made at twilight — hours after the funeral ended, family members returned unexpectedly to the cemetery for a final goodbye. Long after most photographers would have left the family, Peter’s tenacity enabled him to capture a photograph that the boy will not understand until he is much older. The heartbreaking significance of the intimate moment resonates, a private farewell unobtrusively recorded.

Peter van Agtmael—Magnum for TIME

Aiden Ricketts, the son of William 'Seth' Ricketts, poses for a picture at his father's grave after his funeral. Aiden's grandmother takes his picture.

More than five years after his first trip to the Middle East, Peter continues to build on a deeply personal and resonant body of work. His artful eye and his sharp mind make him one of the most exciting young photographers working today. He is undoubtedly deserving of such a significant award, whose previous recipients include Lynsey Addario, Ryan McGinley, Lauren Greenfield, and Paul Graham, among others. TIME is proud to be able to support his vision.

A student in his last year of a degree in visual anthropology—think Margaret Mead’s films—at the University of Victoria, Tepleski was drawn to photography after seeing Masahisa Fukase’s Solitude of Ravens.  Tepleski initially struggled to find a way to combine the two passions. “Anthropology has an appalling history when it comes to representing people from far away places,” says Tepleski. “And anyone working in photography would be keenly aware of the representational issues that have plagued that form as well.” But Tepleski realized as an anthropologist he had the potential, unlike photojournalists, to make a long term commitment to a community, and take a more collaborative approach.

Portraying something as emotionally distant as disenfranchisement, however, presented problems. “There was no action,” says Tepleski. “There was in fact an absence that needed to be photographed—the silence of their voices and the removal of an environment that they were linked to for centuries.” Tepleski hit upon using the sacred river—a spiritually significant place, dotted with shrines, and their main source of water—as surreal back drop for portraits of the villagers.  “While I was living with the community, I came to see the river as a character in their lives,” says Tepleski. “They had built a relationship with this place. And it was about to be broken. I wanted to remove the environment from the subjects, and the subjects from the environment.”

Positioning the villagers—over a 100 showed up instead of the expected dozen—in the river. The photographer shot them with the sun coming from behind their left shoulder to get the light bouncing off the murky water,  giving him a two hour window each morning to work. “I stood slightly above the river bank that I lined with white satin” explains Tepleski, who ran out of film the first day of the three day shoot. “And I exposed for the subjects skin tones.” The subjects are properly exposed, while the river becomes an over-exposed void. “The river is still present,” says Tepleski. “But only as a reflection or memory.”

With the villagers now relocated, Tepleski is returning to visit their new home this summer. Working on a non-profit, the Friends of Bui, dedicated to finding ways for the villagers to supplement their income with crafts like soapmaking, Tepleski is also trying to help the villagers with their wish for computers and internet access.

More of Tepleski’s work, including videos and essays, can be accessed here. He is represented by the Luz Gallery, Victoria, BC Canada and the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York City.

Tepleski also recorded music in Bui, downloads and CDs are available here. All profits from print and music sales go to the Friends of Bui society. So far $5,000 has been raised.

If you’re interested in the field of visual anthropology, Tepleski recommends you also look at the work of Jean Rouch.

—By Kira Pollack and Deirdre van Dyk

To get the interlay of female and flower right, Belin first cast models who could pull off a particular look–a plastic beauty coupled with Grace Kelly glamour.  She then styled them with make-up, hairstyles and jewelry inspired by the 1950s aesthetic. The sculptural quality of the hairdos and the roundness of the pearls, would, Belin envisioned, create the a perfect relationship with the baroque shapes of flowers.

Once she had the photos of the 11 models, Belin set to work selecting, arranging and shooting formal portraits of bouquets. (For weeks her Parisian studio, filled with pails of  blooms, looked like the backroom of a florist’s shop).  The final prints were made by interweaving both images–bouquet and model–and simplifying the color palettes, choosing just two or three shades.

Courtesy Galerie Jérôme-de-Noirmont, Paris

Exhibition View of Black Eyed Susan

The resulting life-size photos, which went on show in January at Paris’s Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont (left) have Belin’s take on artiface and affectation.

For her next project, the artist, building on some of the techniques learned while working on the “Black Eyed Susan” inlays, tackles a project using the backdrop of cities around the world.

Belin’s work can be seen on her website valeriebelin.com and is exhibited in multiple museum collections, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Musee d’art Moderne, The Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.