TOURINFO- Spreading the word about what really is happening, one bomb at a time. A missile that landed on a street is surrounded by barricade tape in Shushi, Nagorno-Karabakh, on Oct. 16. The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan reignited in late September, quickly escalating from the frontlines to populated towns and villages. Anush Babajanyan (VII/Redux) photo was exquisitely chosen by TIME as Top 100 photos of 2020.
The war in Nagorno-Karabakh, with Azerbaijan, broke out on the morning of September 27, 2020. It quickly escalated from the frontlines to populated towns and villages.
For three decades there had been a conflict in the South Caucasus, in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, with fighting between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces. In 1994, after six years of war, a ceasefire was concluded, but violence continued along the contact line between the unrecognized republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, and Azerbaijan. It broke out into a four-day war in April 2016, after which it intensely reignited on September 27, 2020.
Here is a pretty street in the Caucasus Mountains. A boulevard, really. The eye is drawn to leaves going gold in the autumn light and to plastic tape, the color of peppermint stretched to form a cordon around something in the road. It is a missile, launched from the enemy side in a war over a patch of the disputed territory, and buried right up to its tail fins in the pavement of a residential street, where, in the year 2020, it stands as a symbol of hope. It didn’t explode. — Karl Vick
By TIME Staff
December 15, 2020
It was a long year made to feel longer by the shadows that lay across it, one atop the next, and experienced as a miasma visible as the atmosphere in so many of the photographs that define it: The half-light of a temporary morgue. Of a city street obscured by tear gas. Of a wildfire’s traveling dusk.
The news photos that captured 2020 — shown here in TIME’s annual unranked selection of 100 — almost need no time stamp, so distinctive was its look. Here was a year with the palette of an Arctic winter, variations on the darkness that just goes on and on, time suspended first by lockdowns that threw life out of routine, then by the understanding that nothing would be the same after.
No one looking through these images a few years hence will have to ask when they come to the tableau of a body and people in hazmat on a China street when that photo was taken. Or what summer two groups of men — one in police uniforms — grabbed the limbs of a young Black protester, surrounded by people in masks. The exception might be the hellscapes created by bushfires, especially the sad, singed animals of Australia. Unless that is, 2020 is remembered, on top of everything else, as the year the slow burn of climate change officially tipped into a conflagration.
What colors the year did produce tended toward the garish hues of America’s political polarization, especially so in images from campaign rallies. But not always.
Here is a pretty street in the Caucasus Mountains. A boulevard, really. The eye is drawn to leaves going gold in the autumn light and to plastic tape, the color of peppermint stretched to form a cordon around something in the road. It is a missile, launched from the enemy side in a war over a patch of the disputed territory, and buried right up to its tail fins in the pavement of a residential street, where, in the year 2020, it stands as a symbol of hope. It didn’t explode. — Karl Vick
