12. Transit centre, Buganda
The image of a Congolese refugee sitting on a swing at a Transit centre near Buganda in May, vibrates with a joy that transcends the material discomforts to which it attests: the relentless rain, the rusting steel frame of the abandoned playground equipment, and the broken seat dangling beside her. With the woman among more than 70,000 people who crossed into Burundi since January, her spirit defies her difficult circumstances. Set the photo beside French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s famous painting The Swing (1767), and it strips away the courtly frivolity of the famous work, reclaiming the swing as a timeless prop of playfulness and inner peace, suspended outside of space and time.
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu/Getty Images13. Meteor shower, Inverness, California
A photo capturing the Eta Aquariid meteor shower as it slashed through the night sky over Inverness, California, in the early hours of 6 May, was at once inspiring and humbling. Dwarfed by the glimmering blur of the Milky Way above it, the glow of a small hamlet appears little more than a flickering footnote in a vast cosmic drama. The affecting contrast between human and heavenly scales recalls Adam Elsheimer’s groundbreaking painting, The Flight into Egypt (c 1609), celebrated for its pioneering astronomical precision. In Elsheimer’s work, the Holy Family occupies only a fraction of the foreground as the eye is drawn upward to the immense night sky. Both images, centuries apart, attest not just to contemporary advances in optics but the perenniality of awe.
Leon Neal/Getty Images14. Oil-covered eyes, London
Covering her eyes in an unctuous, oil-like substance, an activist from the direct-action campaign group Fossil Free London placed herself outside the offices of the Shell energy company in May. Shell’s sale of its onshore oil assets in Nigeria – a move that protesters allege enables the company to dodge responsibility for accidents in the Niger Delta – triggered the demonstration. The company denies wrongdoing. The blindfold pose calls to mind George Frederic Watts’ Symbolist painting Hope, 1886, in which a woman, eyes covered, sits atop a murky globe, plucking a doleful lyre.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images15. Diving swimmer, Singapore
An almost immersive, water-level photo of Chinese swimmer Tianchen Lan, competing in an open-water relay at the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore on 20 July, freezes the athlete in mid-dive as he arcs from an ultramarine platform. The bold abutment of blues – sky, water, and platform – and the arresting suspension of the athlete’s body recall seemingly disparate aspects of French conceptual artist Yves Klein’s imagination: Klein’s creation in 1957 of a singularly intense hue, International Klein Blue, and his 1960 photomontage Leap into the Void. The latter creates the illusion of his body perilously plummeting from a Paris rooftop to the street below, like the Singapore photo, positing the body and the abyss as one.
Phill Magakoe/AFP/Getty Images16. Ballet students, Tembisa, South Africa
A photo of two 5-year-old ballet students, Philasande Ngcobo and Yamihle Gwababa, posing in July outside a dance academy in Tembisa, South Africa, was powerful and touching. The stark contrast between parched ground, chiselled shadow and delicate dresses recalls the rigorous aesthetic angularities of Degas’s countless scenes of dancers in rehearsal. Keeping our eye fixed on the gestural gravity of his ballerinas, Degas often abstracted the dancing studios to swathes of blank colour, investing his paintings, like the photo from outside Johannesburg, with a timeless dimension.
Getty Images17. Emaciated child, Gaza City
A sequence of devastating images of emaciated children, cradled in the arms of their mothers in Gaza City in July, shocked the world. BBC News reported that, according to the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (Unwra), one in five children in Gaza City was suffering from malnutrition. Publication of this image sparked controversy, after it was alleged that the child depicted in the photo also suffered from pre-existing medical issues that would account for his poor physical condition. While there are countless images in art history of mothers comforting afflicted children, from Dutch artist Gabriël Metsu’s The Sick Child, 1665, to Pablo Picasso’s pastel and charcoal drawing The Disinherited Ones, 1903, such photos as those captured in Gaza are without possible parallel in painting or sculpture. No visual invention of suffering or pity by any artist, however gifted or revered, can adequately encapsulate the scale of unfathomable anguish chronicled in these recent photos.
Thanassis Stavrakis/AP18. Sheep rescue, Patras, Greece
Against a backdrop of woolly smoke billowing from the wildfires that struck Patras in August, a man on a motorcycle is seen rescuing a sheep that clings to him for dear life. The gesture recalls early depictions of the Good Shepherd in the Roman catacombs of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, where Christ shoulders a vulnerable animal. Across ages, the recurring motif – whether preserved in fresco or captured in a photograph – reinforces the enduring mythical nature of heroism.
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This article has been updated to provide additional context regarding the emaciated child in Gaza.
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