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21 images of 2021
2021 A tale of survival and hope
It has been a rough year for many people globally, with Covid-19 affecting daily life. In these photos chosen as a representation of the past 12 months, we find emotion and truth - and something more. We discover something of humankind's distress and fightback, something that tells a wider story.
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Horace, the Roman poet, once noted that "a poem is like a painting". Perhaps he will not mind if we give his words a slight modern twist and say "a photograph is like a poem". Its expression can charm us, its imagery hypnotise us, its intensity arrest us. Like the photograph itself, we go still and quiet for a while as we look.
We know the power of images because at year's end we often reach for them, shuffling them together in newspapers to create a sort of neat album for an untidy year. Like the poem, this process is personal.
