Kelly Grovier picks 15 of the most startling photos from this year – including images of the riots at the US Capitol and an airplane in Kabul – and compares them with iconic artworks.
COP26 speech, Tuvalu, November 2021
Addressing the UN climate conference in Glasgow, the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu’s foreign minister Simon Kofe stood in a suit at a lectern thigh-deep in seawater to demonstrate how rising sea levels and the accelerating climate crisis threaten his low-lying nation. “We will not stand idly by,” Kofe insisted, “as the water rises around us.” The striking image and his anxious words called to mind a whole history of images of figures and communities imperilled by the whim of waves and water, from Jan Asselijn’s terrifying painting The Breach of the Saint Anthony’s Dike near Amsterdam (which reconstructs the catastrophic tide that struck the Dutch coast in the wee hours of 5 March 1651) to German digital artist Kota Ezawa’s 2011 computer-generated work The Flood, inspired by media images of high water sinking neighbourhoods in the deep south of America.
Sculpture, Italy, 2021
A witty photo allegedly depicting the invention of the lateral flow test went viral on social media in November. The cast reconstruction of a group of sculptures from the 1st-Century villa of Tiberius in Sperlonga, Italy, needless to say portrays something very different from present-day Covid swabbing: the blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who had trapped Odysseus and his party in a cave. According to the legend, Odysseus eventually manages to ply Polyphemus (who had eaten several pairs of the epic hero’s entourage) with “undiluted” wine before lancing his single eye with a sharpened spear. Anyone who has self-administered the lateral flow test and accidentally probed a little deeper than they’d intended may feel Polyphemus got off lightly.