Time unveiled its “Top 10 Photos of 2011″ online last week. At least four of the photographs cover African topics: they’re all from “conflict” situations–two in Libya’s civil war (view it here and here), one in Egypt’s Tahrir Square and this one, below, taken by photographer Dominic Nahr in Mogadishu, Somalia on August 9, 2011:
Here’s the caption:
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.
In an introduction to the images Time‘s Ishaan Tharoor writes of these images as “iconic.”
