From the White House balcony to a flooded Bangkok: the week in pictures

PARIS — France 24's weekly round-up of photography, published on Sunday, September 27, 2026 at 12:05, assembles ten frames that summarise a week dominated by high-level diplomacy, a papal journey, Atlantic weather and street-level unrest. The images, drawn from the Reuters, AP and AFP picture wires, span Washington, Lourdes, Berlin, the New Jersey shore, UN headquarters in New York, the French national team's training centre, Bangkok and Madrid — a reminder of how quickly the international agenda can shift from ceremonial spectacle to climate disruption and social tension.

The lead image shows US President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping standing on a balcony of the White House in Washington on September 24, after watching a military demonstration. Reuters photographer Evan Vucci captured the trio framed by the presidency's ceremonial architecture, a setting that lends the moment a distinctly theatrical quality. The choice of this picture as the opening of the selection signals the weight editors placed on the meeting between the two leaders, and on the pageantry that accompanied it.

Political symbolism rarely travels as well as a balcony tableau, and the image illustrates why such encounters are so heavily staged for the cameras. A military display offers a backdrop that is unmistakably national in character, allowing both hosts and guest to project strength and ceremony in a single frame. The photograph also captures the three figures at the moment the formal programme gives way to the informal one — after the demonstration rather than during the negotiations that preceded it.

The second photograph moves from Washington to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes in south-western France, where Pope Leo XIV led a prayer with worshippers before the statue of the Virgin Mary at the Grotto of Massabielle. Taken by Alberto Pizzoli for AFP on September 26, it captures the second day of the pope's visit to France, a journey France 24 followed closely with live coverage, including the open-air Mass at the Lourdes pilgrimage site reported on the day this gallery was assembled. Lourdes, one of the most visited Marian shrines in the world, drew a crowd whose scale and devotion the image conveys through the density of figures gathered at the rock face.

A third frame offers a sharp change of register: the start of the Berlin marathon on September 27, with the Brandenburg Gate rising in the background. Lisi Niesner of Reuters chose a wide view, keeping the runners in the foreground and the monumental landmark behind them, a composition that places an everyday mass of athletes squarely within national history. It is worth noting that politics intrudes on Berlin this week in other ways: France 24's news agenda the same day also carried a question about whether the far-right AfD can be barred from sensitive intelligence work, prompted by claims of a "Russian sleeper cell" network. The marathon picture, however, belongs to a different register entirely — a city celebrating movement rather than argument.

Weather provides the fourth strand of the week. On September 26, a surfer caught a wave as a nor'easter battered the US northeast coast in Rockaway, New Jersey, in a photograph by Caitlin Ochs for Reuters. The image captures the counterintuitive attraction of rough seas, and the wider northern storm system that drove conditions along the Atlantic seaboard. It is one of two frames credited to Ochs in the selection, and the pairing is instructive: the same photographer covered both the fury of the ocean and the measured diplomacy of the United Nations in a single assignment week.

Her second photograph, from September 24, shows Mahmoud Abbas, President of Palestine and head of the Palestinian National Authority, addressing the 81st United Nations General Assembly by pre-recorded video message from UN headquarters in New York. The medium matters: delivering a speech remotely, rather than in the General Assembly hall, frames the address as a statement made under constraints. France 24 continues to file the Middle East conflict among its standing topics, and the inclusion of this image in a general-interest week-in-pictures selection reflects how persistently the region returns to the top of the agenda.

Away from politics, a quieter French scene was captured on September 21 at the Clairefontaine training centre west of Paris, where Zinédine Zidane took part in a session with the French national football team. The photograph, credited to Thomas Padilla of the AP, belongs to the cycle of pre-international-window preparations that occupy national coaches in the fortnight before competitive matches. Its inclusion gives the round-up a sporting, human-scale counterpoint to the summits and assemblies elsewhere in the gallery.

On the other side of the world, the monsoon-type deluge that hit Thailand was documented by Reuters photographer Patipat Janthong, who photographed a person wading through a flooded street in Bangkok during heavy rain on September 26. It is the most immediate illustration of the week in physical terms: streets transformed into channels, daily movement interrupted, and urban infrastructure tested by accumulated rainfall. The flooding is the reason the gallery's title refers to floods ravaging the country, and it stands as a reminder of how routinely extreme weather now structures the news agenda alongside diplomatic events.

The final photograph returns to Europe and to anger. On September 26 in Madrid, a protester burned a placard bearing the images of the owners of the company Urbagestion during a demonstration against Spain's housing crisis, following the eviction of an 87-year-old woman from her apartment. Alejandro Martinez Velez of Reuters recorded the scene, and the choice of this frame as the closing image is deliberate: it ends the week not on a handshake or a prayer but on a fire, a symbol of pressure building around a problem — unaffordable, inaccessible housing — that has become one of Spain's most visible domestic flashpoints. The age of the woman evicted, foregrounded in the caption, is what gives the protest its particular weight.

Taken together, the ten images trace a common thread: moments of public ceremony, collective belief, physical spectacle and contestation. Two of the pictures were taken at fixed ceremonial locations, the White House balcony and the Lourdes grotto, where crowds assemble to watch and to be seen. Two record weather acting on human bodies — the surfer in New Jersey and the wader in Bangkok. Two capture the machinery of international representation, with leaders in a military parade and at a UN lectern. And two look at how societies gather, in a marathon field and a Madrid protest, to mark achievement or to register grievance.

The selection is typical of France 24's continuing "week in pictures" series, which each Sunday curates the previous week's most striking frames from its bureaus. The edition published this week follows earlier instalments covering Syria protests, Céline Dion on stage and Quito wildfires, and a previous cycle marking the 9/11 anniversary, a far-right result in Germany and the Houthis' offensive in Yemen. Together they form a visual archive of a turbulent period, and a reminder that the pictures chosen for publication reflect, in their own way, where a news organisation believes the centre of gravity of the week has been.