The year 2024 gave us these 8 unusual images

This year has offered us surprising photos, which immerse us in distant cultures or immortalize unexpected moments. From bear hunters on the edge of the Arctic to England’s St Helens Theater Royal, including the release of a small slow loris in West Java, a look back at some unusual images from the past year.

On April 25, 2024, Martin Madsen, a 28-year-old Inuit bear hunter, advances with his sled dogs to Ittoqqortoormiit, on the frozen waters of Scoresby Strait, the largest fjord in the world, on the east coast of Greenland, the edge of the Arctic. All the men in the village of 350 inhabitants are bear, seal, narwhal and musk ox hunters, following an ancestral way of life passed down from generation to generation. Over the past twenty years, climate change and quotas have gradually jeopardized this tradition which guarantees the survival of Inuit families.

Money Sharma/AFP

Members of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) force march during a rehearsal for India’s upcoming Republic Day parade, in New Delhi, January 4, 2024.

Rodrigo Oropeza / AFP

Purépechas, an indigenous people of the town of Ocumicho, located in the state of Michoacán (Mexico), celebrate Fuego Nuevo on 1^is February 2024. During this ceremony, fires are lit to mark the start of the new year.

Jerome Brouillet / AFP

Brazilian Gabriel Medina poses in the air after surfing a big wave during the 5^e round of 3^e men’s surfing tour, as part of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, in Teahupo’o, on the French Polynesian island of Tahiti, July 29, 2024.

Oli Scarff/AFP

Actor Richard Aucott, who plays Nurse Nelly in the Christmas pantomime ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, prepares to perform at the St Helens Theater Royal in north-west England on December 5, 2024.

Aditya Aji / AFP

A slow loris will be released, along with seven other of its kind, in the conservation area of ​​Halimun Salak National Park in Sukabumi (West Java, Indonesia) on January 19, 2024. This small primate is threatened by human activities which destroy its natural environment, but also through poaching, because its fur and its eyes are supposed to have virtues according to traditional medicine.

Mahmoud Hams / AFP

As fighting between Israel and Hamas rages, two young Palestinians celebrate their wedding at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) school in the neighborhood from Al-Salam in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, on January 12, 2024.

Michael Dantas/AFP

People carry drinking water along a sandbar of the Rio Madeira in Humaitá (Amazonas state, northern Brazil), September 7, 2024. More than a thousand Brazilian cities are then in a state of emergency. alert due to low humidity, comparable in some cases to that of deserts like the Sahara, while the country faced, in 2024, to the worst drought in its history.