NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY is often meant to be consumed instantly, on paper, on our screens, in endless scrolling feeds. It tells us what the world looks like right at a given moment. But it can lose much of its power that way — the power to seize us, to shake us awake, to interrupt the everyday. There is always a new image. Scenes of the present become instantly the past.

Put together at the end of a year, though, their essence is restored. The images here compel us to look closely, look twice, look slowly. And in doing so, we can ask ourselves: How do we react to what we see — not only in the moment we look at it, but in our daily lives? How does that reaction prepare us for the way we will face the future?

The word “empathy” has been tossed around a lot lately, which probably signals its actual absence in so many spheres of human interaction. It is said of a particular book that it is written with “great empathy,” or that a certain film is good because it “teaches empathy.” Perhaps our standards should be higher. Empathy is the minimum, but we need to step into the world with more than that. What about art teaching us indignation? What about rage and historical responsibility?

At first glance, these photographs are a retrospective of the year we are about to leave behind. If many of them seem, on closer inspection, like a recurring nightmare, it’s because yes, they are. Most of the crises, conflicts and natural disasters they capture aren’t new, but are ones dragged on from previous years, or are otherwise a resurfacing of symptoms of social ailments that have gone unattended for too long. If we look even more closely, we realize these are in fact photographs about the future.

There is the disturbingly sad gaze of a baby girl being embraced by her mother, a victim of the opioid crisis. How can a baby’s eyes look this sad? It’s as if she were staring into a future that most of us dare not imagine. Every 15 minutes in the United States, a baby is born with neonatal abstinence syndrome. Imagine their future.

There are young palms raised high during a student protest, shortly after the Parkland school shooting. On each palm is a word, and together these words compose the shattering, almost stuttered sentence: again / don’t / shoot/ don’t /shoot / never. How do we articulate that future?

There is the skyward-facing Ja’Mal Green standing next to Jedidiah Brown, Chicago activists who have fought mass incarceration and police brutality in African-American communities. There are approximately two million people in prison in the United States, the majority of them black and brown. An African-American male is more likely to go to prison than to college. Let’s change that future.

We see the cardboard cutouts of Mark Zuckerberg wearing a T-shirt that reads “Fix Fakebook,” as part of an effort to denounce the role the company may have played in spreading disinformation and affecting electoral results around the world — most recently, the election of a far-right leader in Brazil. Let’s tell that future: We’re watching you, too.

It is impossible to look at the searing image of Amal Hussain, 7, photographed at a hospital in northern Yemen, and not think of the future she will not have. She died in November. What is the future for other children in Yemen?

What many of these pictures have in common is not only the tragedies they depict, but also the fact that underlies those tragedies, which is that while some die or are killed, while some fall prey to addiction, while their countries fall into the hands of authoritarians, others may profit. Pharmaceutical companies profit, arms companies profit, Facebook profits. We see here the dispossession that enables the few — all those suits and ties — to silence the many.

But then there is the woman from Central America, holding her little boy’s hand. She’s wearing a T-shirt that reads “Femme Power.” She has just been released from a detention center at the border, during the summer of family separations. The image begs us not only to think about how asylum seekers are treated in this country, but also to consider how undocumented immigrants can be locked into a narrative that diminishes their agency, one that reduces their fierceness and dignity to victimhood, at best. Look at this woman’s eyes, see how she stares at the world in front of her. Look at yourself, looking. Then look at her gaze again. And remember it, because she is the future. — Valeria Luiselli

Ms. Luiselli is the author of “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions” and the forthcoming novel “Lost Children Archive.”