Tragedy. Beauty. Joy. Anger. The photographers at the Post roll on breaking news and illustrate events and features of note, freezing them in time as a record of moments in the city’s history.
In 2021 they captured photographs of crime, precious memories, heartbreaking funerals along with a lengthy study of a modern medical miracle that saved the life of a young girl.
Enjoy just a few of the brilliant images photographed in 2021 by Visuals Editor Thomas R. Cordova and photographers Brandon Richardson, Cheantay Jensen and Crystal Niebla.
Joanna Honorato, 18, holds a picture frame of her parents during a vigil in the Willmore neighborhood in Long Beach on Sunday, Sept. 5. Family and neighbors filled a stretch of roadway across from Drake Park on Sunday evening, weeping and praying for a Long Beach couple who were shot to death there the night before. Photo by Crystal Niebla.
Drake Woodson, 32, peers through a vintage 50mm Canon chrome nose lens at his new vintage camera store, Relics, the first Black-owned vintage camera brick-and-mortar shop in Long Beach. Photo by Cheantay Jensen.
Hilbert Armijo holds the urn of his father Thomas Armijo on March 15 after a funeral service for both his father and older brother James Armijo, who both died of COVID-19 in Long Beach. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.
A child watches penguins at the Aquarium of the Pacific in on June 17. Photo by Brandon Richardson.
A woman rushes police officers at the end of a two-hour standoff with a shooting suspect on July 1. Police were searching for a man who surrendered after a shooting and a short pursuit after police surrounded a home in North Long Beach. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.
Tatianna Morrison, mother of Cambodian mixed martial arts fighter Sovannahry “Sweet Savage” Em, holds a frame of her daughter as a young girl at her home in Central Long Beach on Feb. 18. “My parents loved mixed martial arts too,” Morrison said, describing the intergenerational connection to fighting. “I watched Chinese Kung Fu movies a lot, and I would practice. I just loved it.” She recalled Em becoming fond of martial arts when she began wrestling with her younger siblings at age 3. Photo by Crystal Niebla.
A great white egret and a pair of ducks stand on a branch a couple yards above the water along the El Dorado Nature Trail in East Long Beach, March 7. Photo by Brandon Richardson.
Sheriff’s deputies use a pepper spray canister to force a driver, left, out of his vehicle after an hour-long standoff in front of the LA County Sheriff station in Lakewood on Saturday, June 12. Photo by Brandon Richardson.
A protester, Julie, stands with over 100 anti-vaccine activists as they rally at Bluff Park in Long Beach Tuesday, Nov. 9. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.
Jose Pedraza, 47, receives chemotherapy for his stage 3 colorectal cancer at MemorialCare’s Todd Cancer Institute in Long Beach, Wednesday, March 31, 2021. Photo by Brandon Richardson.
Surgeons work on 6-month-old Zhavia Hadaway’s heart at Long Beach Memorial Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2021. The baby from Barbados underwent a life-saving heart surgery at Long Beach Memorial after being born with a condition known as Tetralogy of Fallot, which causes oxygen-poor blood to flow out of the heart and into the rest of the body. The surgery was a success and Hadaway was discharged four days later. The operation was the first through a new partnership between the Miller Children’s & Women’s Hospital Long Beach and World Pediatric Project, which brings patients from less developed parts of the world to the United States for critical procedures they could not receive in their home country. Photo by Brandon Richardson.