Views on history in the making

Photos of pomp and ceremony dominate the latest edition of The Times Picture Annual, with the visit of Pope Benedict XVI and the funeral of President Emeritus Guido de Marco taking pride of place.

The publication has a mixture of tragedy, such as the Gozo fireworks factory explosion, and amusing offbeat moments, as in the case of when the National Stadium football pitch suffered a pitch invasion – by a kitten.

These images are among 163 photographs taken between November 11 last year and November 10, 2010, and brought together in the fifth edition of The Times Picture Annual.

The majority of the photos were taken by The Times photographers Jason Borg, Matthew Mirabelli, Chris Sant Fournier and Darrin Zammit Lupi.

The 192-page colour book also includes a section of foreign photos by AFP photographers, David Schembri, the Challenge 8000 team on Mount Everest and LifeCycle’s John Wood.

In his foreword, former The Times editor Victor Aquilina speaks about photography at The Times of Malta during World War II and, particularly, about photographer John Scerri, one of the company’s spotters on the rooftop looking out for warnings of imminent air raids.

Mr Scerri was more interested in taking photographs of the bombings and Mabel Strickland once said of him: “If he had done a little more spotting and a little less photographing when the bombers were overhead, we would have felt much safer.”

The book is divided into seven sections: news, the papal visit, people in the news, daily life, arts and entertainment, sport and foreign news. The images in them are not mere snapshots taken by photographers on the job; these are views on history in the making and include a number of previously unpublished images.

The Times Picture Annual 2010 is available from Word For Word from today and from leading bookstores in the coming days. The four previous editions of the book are also available.