The spilled French fries City Paper staff photographer Darrow Montgomery shot in September might as well be a metaphor for 2021. The year 2020 closed with news of a new president and promising results from COVID-19 vaccine trials, and the new year dawned with the promise and glow of a golden fried potato. Then, six days into January, hordes of insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, resulting in armed soldiers pacing our streets and the entire complex getting fenced off for more than six months.

You’ll see images from those dark early days of the year in the following pages, but you’ll also see the ordinary and extraordinary things Montgomery captured while going about his life. Through his lens, we see a robin’s perch next to a stoop sculpture transform into an idiom, a dog’s paws disrupt fresh snow, and blossoms from a flowering tree blanket a lawn. His photos allow us to grasp these moments of joyful normalcy for a little while longer.

Normalcy, of course, has yet to return. Passersby and public officials continue to wear masks or remove them briefly to pose for portraits. The colonnade at Union Station has become an outdoor photo studio. We’re still not sure how to best tour new apartments, despite how eager building managers may be to fill units. And yet the world keeps on spinning forward and the sky remains above us. Be they cloudy, sunlit and cerulean, or crosscut with a rainbow, they’re a constant reminder—for Montgomery and the rest of us—to keep looking up. —Caroline Jones