Approximately 80 photographs, the majority of them in color, appear in the average issue of TIME. They are picked from among thousands of pictures that Time Inc. processes in its own photo lab, or collects from picture agencies and wire services every week. The goal of the Picture Department, under Editor Arnold Drapkin, is to find the pictures that best depict the persons or events in the stories they accompany. For the last issue of TIME every year, however, the Picture Department undertakes a very different assignment: creating the special section called Images, a portfolio of the year's best photographs. The pictures are chosen not to be helpful supplements to the news, but as superb visual representations in their own right that have the power to convey the sense or mood of an entire story.

The selection and presentation of Images '83 was largely done by Special Projects Art Director Tom Bentkowski and Picture Researcher Mary Anne Golon, under the supervision of Executive Editor Ronald Kriss. Says Kriss, who has edited Images for the past five years: "We don't try to be comprehensive. We look first for the best pictures, then for those that illustrate major news events. Fortunately, the best news stories often generate the best pictures."

During the past ten weeks, Golon has looked at more than 20,000 photographs. After reducing this formidable total to 600, she, Bentkowski and Kriss made the final selections for the 22 pages of Images (plus two pages of Farewell obituaries). Says Golon: "It was a little like putting Niagara Falls through a sieve, but working with the world's best pictures is exhilarating."

The quotations that accompany the photographs were the responsibility of Reporter-Researchers Peggy Berman, Zona Sparks and Rosemarie Tauris Zadikov. They culled hundreds of TIME stories, correspondents' files, newspapers and books to find the appropriate words that would convey not only information about, but the ambience of, an event. Says Berman: "You offer a selection of quotations, but always know when you have found exactly the right one."

Bentkowski sums up the total effect of the section: "A photograph, being immediate and specific, theoretically cannot be an abstraction. But these pictures, combined with our visual memories of events from magazines, newspapers and TV, take on the power of abstraction. They tell, in capsule, the story of 1983, a year brilliantly seen through the camera's lens, thanks to the skill--even the genius--of the photographers who took them." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.