TIME Picks the Top 10 Photos of 2011

  • Yuri Kozyrev. Ras Lanuf, Libya. March 11, 2011 With 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 sides—both 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 lines—suddenly, 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 weapons—they were scared—and it was just an incredible experience to be there.
    Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME
    1 of 10
  • Adam Ferguson. Paktika Province, Afghanistan. September 10, 2011 I 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.
    Adam Ferguson—VII for TIME
    2 of 10
  • James Nachtwey. Kesennuma, Japan. March 15, 2011 The 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 one's 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 we've 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.
    James Nachtwey for TIME
    3 of 10
  • Pete Souza. Situation Room, White House, Washington. May 1, 2011 During 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 didn't 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.
    Pete Souza—White House
    4 of 10
  • Wayne Tilcock. University of California, Davis, California. November 18, 2011 Compared to the physicality I'd seen in footage of Occupy confrontations in Oakland and Berkeley the students leading this protest kept it very orderly, positive and non-aggressive even as some other students who had gathered to watch the scene as classes let out had started some negative chants directed at the police. The calm tension of the whole scene was almost surreal with the light-hearted chants by protesters ("Hey, hey. You're cute. Please take off your riot suit"), students handing out legal forms for those expecting to be arrested, the casual nature with which Lt. Pike delivered the pepper spray. Minutes after riot police exited the Quad, the police chief had stuck around discussing the best places in the States for pizza with a European exchange student who was staying in the Occupy encampment. During the protest I focused on putting myself in position as close as I could to the protesters and was lucky that the officer who was in front of me during the pepper spraying (who was assisting from the City of Davis police dept.) recognized me and allowed me to stay on the edge of the walkway with the protesters. Afterwards I wanted to make sure our readers understood there were real people involved which is why we chose to identify the police officer (Lt. John Pike, whose name was provided by the police deptartment upon request) and the protester seated face up in the pepper spray (David Buscho, whose name I already knew from a story we had done the previous weekend on co-housing and who agreed to have his name used again for this story).
    Wayne Tilcock—The Enterprise/AP
    5 of 10
  • Chris Hondros. Misrata, Libya. April 20, 2011 To bring visual order to a chaotic scene. Chris Hondros excelled at this, especially in conflict zones. His composition of the rebel leaning forward, striding up the stairs, the machine gun firmly in his grasp. The fire smoldering on the stairs. There is purpose in this rebel soldier as there was in Chris that day. This is a moment that exists but for a brief millisecond and Chris, like the very best of photographers, had the ability to capture that fleeting instance and make a picture that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Chris was killed by a mortar round later that same day and I will never be able to tell him how much I admired the picture he made that morning in Misrata. -Pancho Bernasconi—VP/News and Sports of Getty Images
    Chris Hondros—Getty Images
    6 of 10
  • Dominic Nahr. Mogadishu, Somalia. August 9, 2011 I 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 children's 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.
    Dominic Nahr—Magnum for TIME
    7 of 10
  • Pedro Pardo. Acapulco, Mexico. January 9, 2011 In this picture, we see the relatives of a person who was kidnapped at dawn from a disco in Acapulco and later killed by being thrown from a bridge in the town of La Cima at the entrance of this tourist destination. As a conflict photographer in the war of the drug cartels, I have learned how to be like a doctor when I look at a violent scene, separating my emotions and observing the deed in an objective way in order to come up with a good image that can inform without being morbid or sensational.
    Pedro Pardo—AFP/Getty Images
    8 of 10
  • Stefanie Gordon. Shuttle launch. May 16, 2011 The photo was an unexpected hit that I took from almost 35,000 ft. over Florida, flying from New York City to Palm Beach with—of all things my—iPhone 3GS, and tweeted it out upon landing. I didn't realize the impact of the photo or the rounds it was making in social media until a few hours later when I looked at my Twitter mentions and all the personal messages I was receiving on Facebook. Next thing I knew, I was being interviewed by media outlets from all over the world, and my photo was on almost every evening news program. I am still in search for that perfect job that many thought would be offered to me after the photo caught fire.
    Stefanie Gordon—AP
    9 of 10
  • Yuri Kozyrev. Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt. February 1, 2011 It was my first day in Cairo. I was lucky to find the right place to stay at the hotel, which was facing Tahrir Square—it was my first impression of it. From the balcony, I saw the overcrowded space—thousands and thousands of people—and 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.
    Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME
    10 of 10
By TIME Photo Department

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

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