Phill Magakoe/AFP/Getty Images
10. 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 Images
11. Starving 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. According to UN-backed experts, the “worst-case scenario” of famine is currently playing out in Gaza. 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/AP
12: 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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