AP photo editors published a selection of standout vertical images from April 22-28, 2026, in a mobile scroll photo gallery titled “See the world in vertical: Top photos by AP photojournalists.” The gallery, curated by AP photo editors, stitches together scenes of spectacle, control, grief, and corporate display, with the people at the bottom of the hierarchy often appearing in the sharpest relief.
Who Gets Managed
Among the images is a scene from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington on April 25, 2026, where a tipped-over wine glass sat in a bowl on an abandoned table after gunfire erupted at the Washington Hilton. In the same setting, members of law enforcement were shown controlling shooting suspect Cole Tomas Allen during the dinner. A protester also appeared outside the Washington Hilton holding a head costume depicting Pete Hegseth while the event was taking place. The gallery gives the polished Washington ritual its own backdrop: a room of elite media and political performance interrupted by gunfire, police control, and a protester outside the door.
The same gallery includes President Donald Trump and Britain’s King Charles attending the arrival ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on April 28, 2026. The image places state power and inherited power side by side, framed as ceremony. The gallery also shows CEO of Xpeng He Xiaopeng arriving at his company’s booth during the Auto China in Beijing on April 24, 2026, another reminder that corporate power gets its own stage, its own lighting, and its own choreography.
Who Pays the Price
Not every image is about pageantry. One photo shows Abbas Awad, who has glaucoma, posing for a portrait at his home in Qoz Nafisa village, Sudan, on April 22, 2026. Another shows a relative mourning during a funeral for a family member who was killed in an attack on the Pan-American Highway that authorities blamed on dissident former FARC rebels in Cajibio, Colombia, on April 28, 2026. These are the people left to absorb the damage while armed forces, authorities, and armed groups sort out their own power struggles.
In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, children stood next to a police officer during a visit from Jordanian Princess Sarah Zeid, a World Food Programme advisor, at a shelter for families displaced by gang violence on April 27, 2026. The image places displaced families, police, and an international aid figure in the same frame, with the shelter standing in for the social wreckage produced by violence and displacement. The gallery does not describe what the shelter can change, only that it exists and that the people inside have already been pushed out of their homes.
What the Camera Catches
Other images in the gallery show the machinery of public life and private survival in motion. Michael Brennan is pictured sending mud and water flying as he tries to hit his ball out of floating debris on the 18th hole, only to have it land back in the water, during the first round of the PGA Zurich Classic golf tournament at TPC Louisiana in Avondale on April 23, 2026. In Rio de Janeiro on April 23, 2026, worshippers watched fireworks on the feast day of Saint George outside Saint George Church. In St. Petersburg, Russia, a boy released an owl that had been restored to health at the bird hospital ‘Green Parrot’, marking Earth Day, on the outskirts of the city on April 22, 2026.
The gallery also includes Anne Hathaway and Donatella Versace standing before photographers upon their arrival to the premiere of the film ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2' in London on April 22, 2026, Billie Eilish posing for photographers upon arrival at the screening of her film “Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D)” in London on April 28, 2026, and horses coming off the track after a workout at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., on April 27, 2026. AP photo editors describe the collection as standout vertical images published by The Associated Press in the past week, but the sequence itself reads like a catalog of who gets photographed as spectacle, who gets controlled, and who gets left to live with the consequences.