14 of the most striking images of 2022
(Image credit: Diego Reyes/AFP/Getty Images)
Kelly Grovier picks 14 of the most startling photos from this year – including Ukrainian soldiers playing chess with Molotov cocktails, Iranian protesters and wildfires in Spain and the US – and compares them with iconic artworks.
(Credit: Diego Reyes/AFP/Getty Images)
Demonstration against illegal immigration, Iquique, Chile, January 2022
A man sits on a lawn chair holding a pretty pastel parasol against the blazing sun, seemingly oblivious of the apocalyptic plumes of smoke billowing up from the burning tyres, a few feet away, that are scattered across the highway on which he is surreally perched. Impeding access to Iquique, a city in north Chile near the border with Bolivia, where groups agitating against illegal immigration have organised protests, he is an implausible paragon of imperturbable calm. The incongruity of his relaxed posture (which rhymes with the idyllic beach, sparkling sea, and poetic palm tree pattern repeated on his parasol) and the chaos raging around him is reminiscent of several Surrealist paintings from the 20th Century – such as Salvador Dalí’s Sewing machine with Umbrella (1941) – that portray the ostensibly innocuous object as absurdly foretokening doom.
(Credit: Yasin Akgul/AFP via Getty Images)
Protest in support of Iranian women, Istanbul, Turkey, September 2022
When Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman, died in a Tehran hospital under suspicious circumstances on 16 September, women around the world began cutting their hair in protest against her treatment by the government of Iran. Amini had been arrested three days earlier by the Islamic Republic’s Guidance Patrol – a vice squad enforcing Islamic dress code – for allegedly wearing the hijab incorrectly. While in the custody of the morality police, according to eyewitnesses, Amini suffered terrible physical abuse and fell into a coma. Photos of Nasibe Samsaei, an Iranian woman living in…