TIME Picks the Top 10 Photos of 2011

We’re in the business of making icons. From immortal covers to probing profiles to our annual Person of the Year, TIME has always shaped the first draft of history with the personalities and moments that mattered most. We get iconic. But 2011 has been a year of iconoclasm: powerful orthodoxies were challenged, notorious villains slain and dictators came crashing down. Along the way, people took photographs.

Our top 10 photos of 2011 capture a year as tumultuous and transformative as any in recent memory. The photos’ captions are in the words of the photographers who shot them. We take you from a tiny Washington control room, crammed with the great eminences of the capital, to the courageous multitudes massed in Tahrir Square. We behold the wrath of nature and the horrors that men inflict on one another. A scene of staggering human depravation in Somalia is joined by an uncanny glimpse of human genius: a NASA shuttle blazes into space, tethered to earth only by a thin line of smoke.

2011 will be remembered as a year of defiance and few acts of resistance will be as memorable to Americans as that ugly incident in California when a police officer fired pepper spray straight into the faces of the college students who refused his orders. Their rebellion — and viral send-ups of the pepper-spraying cop — will live on into the next year. But what of the young American soldier staring at the lens in Afghanistan? In his bewildered gaze is all the terror of war. It’s a look that must have lasted only a fleeting second, yet, haunted with a piercing sadness, stretches across centuries of human experience. It’s iconic. —Ishaan Tharoor

MORE: See the Top 10 of Everything in 2011

Yuri Kozyrev. Ras Lanuf, Libya. March 11, 2011With photography, it's always a moment. You get it, or you miss it. This was on the front lines near Ras Lanuf, Libya. It was near an oil refinery factory that was important for both sidesÑboth the rebels and government. I took this picture on March 11, when Gaddafi's military could still fly, and they were flying around, dropping bombs on the rebels. It was really scary for everybody on the front linesÑsuddenly, you could hear the plane coming and the bombs hitting their targets. These men were the shabab, young people who weren't professional fighters and didn't have weapons or training. They're not rebels, but eager to be on the front lines. They're jumping because they heard the planes coming, so they're running around trying to find any place to hide, which is hard because everything is flat and exposed. You can see from the picture that none of them have any weaponsÑthey were scaredÑand it was just an incredible experience to be there.

Adam Ferguson. Paktika Province, Afghanistan. September 10, 2011I was patrolling with Charlie Company, 2-28 Infantry, 172nd Infantry Brigade 5 km from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border when we were ambushed. The Captain had just made the call to head back to base when bullets seared the still tree leaves around us. Sergeant Daniel Quintana was shot in the first minute of fighting and as the fighting intensified, then waned, the Army Medics worked tirelessly to stabilize him, but it was a losing battle. This was the first time Charlie Company had seen one their own injured since being recently deployed to Afghanistan, and it felt like it. Soldiers on the periphery of where the Medics worked on Quintana had wired excited stares focused on the surrounding tree lines that provided cover for their enemy. Closer to the Medics soldiers crouched stunned, some cried, others talked to Quintana hoping to stimulate a fading life. Specialist Michael Miller, age 23 from Melbourne, Florida, sat at the feet of Sergeant Quintana, silent, with a glassy haunted stare. I saw Specialist Miller through the drama and crouched my way around to him. I tapped him on the shoulder and when he turned and gazed into my lens I not only saw an image from Afghanistan, but an image that could have been made in Vietnam. His expression wreaked of the same senselessness and confusion, the same futility of a life lost under equivocal circumstances.

James Nachtwey. Kesennuma, Japan. March 15, 2011The house was not destroyed; it was gutted, left like a ravaged beast in a water hole, its entrails exposed. The banal construction materials we all take for granted - insulation, ductwork, posts and beams, became emblems of dread, brutally revealing the fragility of our existence in the face of nature. Below the surface of the river the roof of a car slowly materialized, like a phantom tomb. Four days after a tsunami violently obliterated the north east coast of Japan, the silence and the calm were eerie. Fires from broken gas lines were still burning. The earth and sky were merged, and the floating house appeared as a mirage, taunting oneÕs sense of reality. How might the world end? During the Cold War, with the threat of nuclear annihilation, we feared it might end in fire. With the melting of the glaciers, the floods in Asia and two major tsunamis in the first decade of the current millennium, perhaps weÕve had a preview of an apocalypse by water.Thamkrabok Monastery. In Saraburi. Drug addicts undergo rehab with gidance by Buddhist monks who use a secret herbal brew to detoxify the addicts.

Pete Souza. Situation Room, White House, Washington. May 1, 2011During the mission against Osama bin Laden, the President convened multiple meetings in the Situation Room throughout the day. The group moved to a smaller conference room within the Situation Room to monitor the mission as it happened in real time. This photograph is one from about 100 that I made in that setting, and one of about 1,000 that I made during the day. I didnÕt realize this particular photograph would get so much attention mostly because I was so caught up in trying to document everything taking place. I do think in retrospect it accurately reflects the tension and emotion of everyone involved in the mission.

Rebels Engage Gaddafi Forces in Close Combat in Libyan City Of Misrata Struggles Against Gaddafi's Forces

Dominic Nahr. Mogadishu, Somalia. August 9, 2011I have never watched children die in front of me before. Watching their last breath as their chest slowly and with long pauses slightly expand and then deflate again. Until, it suddenly stops. The children who arrived at the Banadir hospital in Mogadishu were in bad shape, but they were the lucky ones. Some of them who made it to the hospital early enough managed to pull through, even with limited medical supplies and overworked, unpaid, and tired nurses. However, for most, it was a place they came to die. Almost all the children I photographed on the second floor in the childrenÕs wing ended up dying. With some I did not even have a chance to know their names or ages. I would return to the room a couple of hours later and the bed the child was lying in before was either empty, or full again with a new child and mother.

Yuri Kozyrev. Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt. February 1, 2011It was my first day in Cairo. I was lucky to find the right place to stay at the hotel, which was facing Tahrir SquareÑit was my first impression of it. From the balcony, I saw the overcrowded spaceÑthousands and thousands of peopleÑand some of them were helping a man who had lost consciousness. I never had a chance to see what happened with him, but I'm pretty sure that people who were around helped him. That was the atmosphere on the ground; people really took care of each other even if they had different views about Egypt, about Cairo, about revolution. If you could see the picture in detail, you would see more than just young revolutionaries. You see old people, you see really religious people. Everyone was together, and that day was very, very special.

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