MY WORLD OF TRUTH

On New Year’s day, a team of pranksters changed the famous hillside sign that looms over Hollywood to ‘Hollyweed’, celebrating a new law that makes recreational use of marijuana legal. It was a timely intervention, argued Kelly Grovier, noting that John Berger died the following day: the British art critic was “responsible for helping make audiences aware of how vulnerable cultural icons are to manipulation,” said Grovier, “changing the way popular audiences responded to the use of works of art by those with the power to reproduce them.” (Credit: Gene Blevins/AFP/Getty Images)

Clad in the ancient robes of a Shaolin monk and hoisted balletically on one foot, an instructor in Wushu, a modern form of traditional kung fu, struck a statuesque pose on a hilltop west of Kabul. Flanked on either side by a retinue of crouching students poised for combat, the female instructor’s stance echoed a shape in ancient Asian art, claimed Grovier. (Credit: Reuters/Mohammad Ismail)

An extraordinary photo, taken in the battle-ravaged Syrian city of Aleppo, was shared widely in March. Shot in the ruined, bomb-rattled home of Mohammed Mohiedin Anis (also known as Abu Omar), and showing the 70-year old collector of vintage cars smoking a pipe while listening to music on a record player, the image was “a mute dirge to the savage devastations of war”, according to Grovier. (Credit: Joseph Eid/AFP)

Footage of Abd Alkader Habak rescuing injured children after a bomb blast on the outskirts of Aleppo showed the moment when the Syrian photojournalist was “forced to choose between remaining separate from the unfolding events or setting his camera aside and inserting himself into the action”, said Grovier. He described a painting made by John Everett Millais after witnessing a firefighter dying in the course of a rescue. (Credit: Baladi News/Muhammad Alrageb)

“The shape of the world is hanging by a thread – or rather, according to experts, by a 110 mile-long (177km) rift,” wrote Grovier in response to a photo showing a rapidly expanding crack in the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. The aerial image, taken in November 2016 by Nasa scientist John Sonntag, was back in the news in May with the announcement that a second rift had been detected. In July, a large portion was reported to have broken from the shelf, creating one of the largest ice bergs ever to break off Antarctica, and a new crack appeared to be extending northwards. (Credit: NASA/John Sonntag)

A photo of a man in Alberta, Canada mowing his lawn while a tornado loomed behind him went viral in June. It was “a masterclass in nonchalance”, argued Kelly Grovier, who compared it with a painting of a twister made in 1939 – the same year Judy Garland, playing the character Dorothy Gale, was swept up by a tornado in the film The Wizard of Oz. (Credit: Cecilia Wessels/Facebook)

A photo of a gorilla looking at a smartphone was shared widely in July after it was posted on Instagram. Taken at the Louisville Zoo in the US state of Kentucky, it showed Lindsey Costello and Jelani watching videos of baby gorillas together, resulting in an image “that shuttles between a tenderness of touch and the cautiousness of an unbridgeable distance”, according to Grovier. (Credit: Lindsey Costello)

“If you really want to understand a people, don’t study the statues they erect. Look at the ones they’ve pulled down,” wrote Grovier after images of protestors toppling a statue of a Confederate soldier circulated in the news in August. Photos of the demonstrators in Durham, North Carolina “had the aesthetic power of the climax of cultural overthrow – those slo-mo moments when the statues of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police force, the Cheka, was toppled in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square in 1991, when Libyan rebels attacked Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s statue in Tripoli in 2011, and when the saluting effigy of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, Baghdad, was dramatically toppled in 2003.” (Credit: Reuters/ Kate Medley)

A striking image of golfers putting calmly against an apocalyptic backdrop was shared widely in September. Showing a group playing a round at the Beacon Rock Golf Course in North Bonneville, Washington, while a wildfire raged in the tree-lined hills behind them, the photo prompted a doubletake in viewers amazed at the putters’ poise. It also reminded Grovier of other images containing “the friction of exterior menace and interior self-possession”. (Credit: Beacon Rock Golf Course/Facebook)

More apocalyptic images emerged in October, when Hurricane Ophelia left a strange haziness in parts of the UK. Looking “more like a cinematic special effect than an actual atmospheric phenomenon”, the skies above Britain were filled with Saharan dust swept up by the storm. Grovier said that “silhouetted against a sepia sunset, worldly objects suddenly darkened into something smoky and strange, surreal as solid shadows”. He compared it to The Scream by Edvard Munch, a painting that also relied for its eeriness on an atmospheric event: in that case, the eruption of Krakatoa in August 1883. (Credit: Peter Macdiarmid/LNP)

A photo that won an award in November – showing a sculpture at a 14th-Century Buddhist temple in central Thailand – was praised by Grovier for “the sense of gradual erasure that seems to deepen before us – of nature slowly eradicating every trace left by the ancient sculptor who created the ruined statue of Buddha almost 700 years ago”. With its “jigsaw of geometric joints and elbowing shadows”, revealing the Buddha’s face “as if on the verge of dissolving into the dense shatter of shapes that surround it”, the image reminded Grovier of Cubist paintings by Picasso and Cézanne. (Credit: Mathew Browne/ Historic Photographer of the Year)

To mark International Human Rights Day on 10 December, an event organised by the Border Network for Human Rights allowed families that have been kept apart by the US-Mexico border to reunite for three minutes. One of the photos that emerged – showing a young girl clutching a balloon as she waited by the barrier in Ciudad Juárez, just south of El Paso, Texas – captured a tension “between the buoyancy of the lifted spirit and the reality of restricted bodies”, according to Grovier. He likened it to an image stencilled by the street artist Banksy onto Israel’s West Bank barrier in 2005, arguing that both “are pinpoints on the map of an imagined elsewhere – an ethereal hinterland of hope where all the walls dissolve”. (Credit: Getty Images)