By Kelly GrovierFeatures correspondent
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus PontoppidanKelly Grovier picks 20 of the most powerful photos from 2023 – including the Icelandic volcanic eruption, Trump's mugshot and a Russian missile attack on a Ukrainian church – and compares them with iconic artworks.
Hannah Reyes Morales/New York Times/Redux/eyevineThe numbers in this piece do not represent ranking, but are intended to make the separate entries as clear as possible.
1. Rio Grande river, Mexico
At first glance, the image is joyously familiar, archetypal even – a child, launched into the air, waits to land in the expectant arms of one who loves him. But this (despite the presence of a Paw Patrol backpack on the left of the scene) is no playground. The photograph, taken on 29 March, captures the moment a little boy is propelled over the Rio Grande river as a large group of migrants cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Though wingless, the boy's frozen flight, suspended against a smooth cerulean sky, connects him with countless cherubs floating through art history – found in the frescoed firmament of church ceilings, and endlessly in Renaissance red chalk drawings, patrolling the border between the world we can see and one we can't.
Kristin Elisabet Gunnarsdottir/AFP via Getty Images2. Reykjanes peninsula, Iceland
Images of residents taking photos on their smartphones of the strange sulfuric sky near the eruption of a volcano on the Reykjanes peninsula in south-west Iceland on 19 December, their bodies flickering to shadow against the bold billows of eerie orange vapour that enveloped them, seemed to issue from another world. The evocative vision of evaporative silhouettes suspended in an atomic haze called to mind a powerful installation that the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson created in the Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern two decades ago, in 2003. For his celebrated work The Weather Project, Eliasson invited visitors to bask in a massive explosion of artificial light (generated by 200 mono-frequency bulbs), as they shifted like shadows through sugar-infused mist beneath a mirrored ceiling, amplifying the otherworldly effect.
Go Nakamura/New York Times/Redux/eyevineCentre for Girls Education, Zaria, Nigeria (Credit: Go Nakamura/New York Times/Redux/eyevine)3. Centre for Girls Education, Zaria, Nigeria
This affecting photo captures the interior of a dwelling in Zaria, Nigeria, where a group of adolescent mothers have gathered with their young children as part of a supportive programme administered by the local Centre for Girls Education. There is a poignancy to the circle of powder blue fabric worn by the girls, which extends beyond the photo's framing to embrace us. Surveying the congregation from an elevated position, a young woman, shrouded in light, peers through a window on the upper left of the photo, as if on a threshold between the protected sphere the adolescents inhabit and one into which they will emerge. Her visionary vantage calls to mind an influential work by the African-American artist Betye Saar, Black Girl's Window, 1969, in which an inscrutable silhouette of a little girl gazes through a real wooden window frame, while above her drifts an enchanting collage of sights and symbols, dreams and the fragments of dreams.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan4. James Webb telescope
An image of the nearest star-forming region to the Earth, glimmering ghostily like a ginormous galactic jellyfish, was released by Nasa in July. Taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, a space observatory designed to undertake infrared astronomy and launched in December 2021, captured the image of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. The fierce forging of a stunning stellar system out of a dazzling discord of gas and dust calls to mind one of Hilma af Klint's pioneering paintings, Primordial Chaos No 7 – among the seminal works with which the pioneering Swedish artist and mystic was covertly constructing an explosively expressive abstract oeuvre, anticipating the big bang of non-figurative art in the coming years.
AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko5. Javier Milei, Argentina
A rousing photo of Javier Milei, the radical libertarian economist who was elected President of Argentina in November, bristles with agitated intensity. It isn't the mute roar from Milei's open mouth that deafens our stare in the image taken during his campaign this year. It's his yowling eyes. We've heard that silent scream before. But where? It doesn't rhyme with the screech coming from the saucer eyes of Edvard Munch's famous howling head – The Scream's iconic cry is much more angsty and existential. Nor is it a perfect match for the soul-curdling screech that unsettles Irish-artist Francis Bacon's famous series of so-called screaming Popes. The closest match to the timbre of the extraordinary roar that reverberates from Milei's eyes we can find is a less-well-known self-portrait of the Dutch master Rembrandt caught uncharacteristically in mid shout.
Reuter/Alkis Konstantinidis6. Temple of Poseidon, Greece
A photo of the full moon rising behind the Temple of Poseidon in Cape Sounion, near Athens, Greece in early July, was stunning. The fragmented columns of the ruined structure, dedicated to the formidable "master of the sea", glimmered amber in the amplified lunar light of the so-called "Buck Moon" – a Native American designation for a full moon that coincides with the emergence of a male deer's new antlers. The magic sparked by the quiet friction of moonlight against ancient stone ignited the imagination of British Romantic artist JMW Turner. His 1834 painting The Temple of Poseidon at Sunium (Cape Colonna), which illustrates a scene from Lord Byron's satirical epic poem Don Juan, is testimony to the timeless allure of the visionary scene.
Matt Mills McKnight/ReutersCars trying to leave the Burning Man festival (Credit: Matt Mills McKnight/Reuters)7. Burning Man, Nevada, US
The claustrophobic sight of automobiles stuck in a lengthy and stressful traffic jam in Nevada's Black Rock Desert following the Burning Man cultural gathering this summer were at odds with the carefree ethos of the week-long retreat devoted to art and self-expression. Heavy rains and flooding just prior to the close of the event forced road closures that caused the epic standstill. Though few who found themselves stranded in the static snake of cars might have thought so at the time, photos of the bottleneck from above captured participants collectively creating a massive momentary sculpture in the sand that dwarfed the famous frozen parade of nose-diving sedans in Amarillo Texas, known as Cadillac Ranch, created in 1974. Now, who wouldn't want to be part of that?
Darryl Dyck, The Canadian Press/AP8. Wildfire, British Columbia, Canada
A smouldering photo of flame-whittled pines silhouetted by a tapestry of angry embers and crimson smoke embroidering the mountainside above a residential neighbourhood in West Kelowna, British Columbia in August was terrifying. The image was just one of countless captured in this, Canada's worst year for wildfires on record, which left millions of acres scorched. Not even the infernal imagination of the Romantic painter of catastrophic conflagration par excellence, John Martin, could match the intensity of percolating peril in his illustration of the moment when the fallen angels enter Pandemonium in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost.
Ilan Rosenberg/Reuters9. Kibbutz Be'eri, Israel
A photo taken on 11 October 2023, four days after Hamas's crushing attack on the Kibbutz, Be'eri in southern Israel, barely hints at the depth of devastation. The eerie, empty gloom chronicled in the image may have a pale echo in a painting by Cecil Constant Philip Lawson of a farm ravaged by war in 1915 – a scene the British military artist witnessed during World War One. But some brutal bleaknesses are beyond parallel.
Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu/Getty Images10. Gaza City, Gaza
The photo of a woman in Gaza City, struggling to make her way between teetering towers of rubble following airstrikes by Israel against Hamas in October, is harrowing. Amid the reverberating abyss of unfathomable destruction, the woman remains composed. A rebuke of oblivion, her resilient physique echoes a fierce form forged in 1912 by the Kiev-born sculptor Alexander Archipenko – Walking Woman, a work indicative of Archipenko's skill in salvaging a semblance of humanity from an annihilating void.
Amanda Jufrian/AFP via Getty Images11. Rohingya refugee, Indonesia
The grace and poise with which the woman holds herself, balancing a bundle on her head in the static stride of the striking photo, may seem, at first glance, the inspiration of countless friezes, frescoes and paintings from antiquity to the present. But the Rohingyan refugee seen wading to shore in Western Indonesia in November was not captured poetically in the timeless toil of her daily routine. Moments before, she was among passengers in desperate need of food and water, crammed onto an overcrowded wooden boat that local authorities allowed temporarily to disembark. She wades courageously into an uncertain future.
Getty ImagesThe mugshot of Donald Trump, taken in Atlanta on 24 August 2023 (Credit: Getty Images)12. Trump mugshot, Atlanta, US
It was the mugshot heard around the world. The booking photo of Donald Trump, taken at an Atlanta jail after the former US president was indicted for conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia, was released moments after it was taken on 24 August. The portrait's penetrating stare instantly seared itself into cultural consciousness, and Trump made the most of it, with his campaign website selling mugshot-branded mugs, t-shirts and drink coolers within hours. The mugshot in the US has a mystique all its own and an arresting allure that Andy Warhol seized upon almost 60 years ago in a series of 13 super-sized portraits he fashioned from the New York Police Department's list of most-wanted individuals, which the Pop Artist provocatively plastered to the side of a pavilion in the New York State Fair in 1964, causing a scandal. It was quickly painted over.
Noemi Llamas/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty ImagesPresident of the Spanish Football Federation Luis Rubiales kisses Jennifer Hermoso of Spain during the medal ceremony of the Women's World Cup Final match (Credit: Getty Images)13. Rubiales kiss, Women's World Cup final, Sydney, Australia
"A kiss," the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman once said, "is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous". If Luis Rubiales, the head of the Spanish football federation, believed that speech would stop, and "words" would "become superfluous" when he kissed midfielder Jennifer Hermoso on the lips in the moments after her team clinched Spain's first Women's World Cup title on 20 August, he was sorely mistaken. While Rubiales has denied allegations of coercion filed by Hermoso, she insisted on social media that photos of him kissing her documented an "act without any consent on my part". It prompts the question: how many captured kisses in cultural history are really on the level? We're looking at Gustav Klimt, and that clench in his 1907/8 painting The Kiss.
Reuters/Etna Walk, Marco Restivo14. Mount Etna, Italy
Photos taken from Piazzale Funivia dell'Etna, Italy, on 1 December of Mount Etna erupting – igniting the night sky with smouldering spumes of liquified rock and gas – were breathtaking. Etna is Europe's highest and most active volcano. In several images, the looping, levitating spew of luminous lava, hurled high into the smoke-scarfed sky from the volcano's mouth (or vent) was a deadly ringer for the blistering plume blazing in the distance of Joseph Wright of Derby's 1776 painting, Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples. Though Wright never witnessed first-hand a major eruption of Vesuvius, his brush's ability to conjure the contours of its incandescence is impressive.
Yui Mok/AFP/Getty Images15. The Coronation of King Charles III, Westminster Abbey, Britain
Attending his grandfather, King Charles III's coronation in May, five-year-old Prince Louis did his best to keep himself stimulated by the solemn and serious proceedings, gazing here and pointing there. And it worked – until it didn't. The photo of the little boy, fourth in line to the throne, letting loose a yawn of right royal boredom so wide it could have swallowed the kingdom, was, in fact, a breath of fresh air. The unrehearsed honesty of the act, its irrepressible impulsiveness, was infectiously charming. Amid the meticulous pomp of the ceremony, where every syllable uttered and gesture made was painstakingly choreographed, Prince Louis's unpretentious, unapologetic yawn provided a moment of light relief – like wandering through a sober museum of endlessly well-behaved portraits and suddenly stumbling across one of the witty self-portraits by the 18th-Century French noble Joseph Ducreux, now pointing at you, now laughing, now belting out a great big yawn.
Getty ImagesThe Holy Transfiguration Cathedral in central Odessa, Ukraine, after a Russian missile strike (Credit: Getty Images)16. Holy Transfiguration Cathedral, Odessa, Ukraine
Some photos shake us. Others are unshakable. Take the photo of parishioners clearing rubble from the inside of the historic Holy Transfiguration Cathedral in central Odessa, Ukraine, following a Russian missile strike on the sacred structure in July. Although the blast is past, the static image manages to appear, with its teetering columns and swinging chandelier, in ceaseless sway, as if the trauma and tragedy it documents is forever unfolding. At the same time, the photo seems to exude an eerie calm, as if the shaken space were utterly inviolable. In the 1630s, a French Baroque painter by the name of François de Nomé uncannily captured something of the same affecting effect in his curiously kinetic painting An Explosion in a Church (recently renamed King Asa of Judah Destroying the Idols). The work's ability to suspend in equilibrium the stricken structure's violent demolition (on the right) and a semblance of its unassailable serenity (on the left), seems cut from the same imperturbable canvas as the recent photo from Odessa.
Getty Images17. House of Representatives, Washington DC, US
About shadows they were never wrong, the Old Masters. If the 16th-Century Italian painter Caravaggio were alive today, perhaps he would have found intriguing the conspiracy of darkness and light in a photo caught on the floor of the US House of Representatives in January. Here, the controversial Republican congresswoman and ally of former President Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, attempts to persuade a colleague, Matt Rosendale from Montana, to speak to Trump, whom she has on hold on her smartphone. The gadget's glow, Greene's outstretched arm, Rodendale's raised hand in refusal and rumples of dark fabric that frame the scene echo the contours and contrasts of Caravaggio's own chiaroscuro canvases.
Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images18. Woodhead Reservoir, Britain
A discarded handgun, rusted into obsolescence, is brought to light by receding water levels in the Woodhead Reservoir in northern England. The parched reservoir bed, cracked and thirsty, frames the forgotten weapon compellingly, as if it were a readymade work of art, eternally on display in an exhibition devoted to the lethality of the climate crisis. In 2016, a similarly deteriorated handgun that was discovered in the field where Vincent van Gogh suffered the gunshot wound that killed him was placed on display in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for an exhibition devoted the artist's mental illness – the psychological droughts and storms, fires and floods that disturbed his troubled soul.
Getty Images19. World Robot Conference, Beijing, China
Images of robots gesticulating fluently and pulling convincing human expressions at the annual World Robot Conference at the Beijing Etrong International Exhibition and Convention Center this summer were truly astonishing. The uncanny sight of female robots appearing to mimic the movements of a male robot "master", dressed in red, shows how deeply hardwired gender roles are, even when gender itself is technically, and technologically, meaningless. A fresco by the 19th-Century Golden Age Danish painter Constantin Hansen, which depicts a clay figure fashioned by the Greek God of Fire, Prometheus, remaining inert until the red-robed deity Athena bestows life on it, offers an intriguing contrast across centuries.
Jack Lodge20. Durdle Door, Britain
It took the photographer Jack Lodge four years to position himself perfectly in space and time in order to capture the fleeting instance when light from the rising sun threads the needle of a natural limestone arch on the Jurassic Coast near Lulworth in Dorset, England. When it finally happened in early December the blazing blossom of an 18-point "sunstar", bursting through "the Durdle Door", as the arch is known, was stunning. The sublime shatter of the morning into a spectacular splay of luminous spokes, an effect that can only be seen during a short window in winter, calls to mind the gorgeous geometry of dawnlight breaking above the Gothic skyline of Neubrandenburg, Germany, as depicted by Caspar David Friedrich in the 1830s.
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