Darrin Zammit Lupi (Ed.): The Times Picture Annual, Allied Publications, 2011.

The older we become the more time seems to fly, and like the cyclone that blew Dorothy’s house to Oz, take us along with it with the unnerving speed of a rollercoaster.

The quartet of The Times photographers have provided us with a pictorial diary that will remain, for years to come, a fundamental historical reference- Kenneth Zammit Tabona

The realisation that yet another year has slipped by is underscored when The Sunday Times contacts me at this time of the year to review its picture annual. This is because these annuals encapsulate the images that have made up the history of 2011 and serve as a reminder of what we have just experienced both on the local front and the international one.

Every time I find it almost impossible to believe another year has gone by, and I remember reviewing the very first edition six years ago as if it were only yesterday.

Of course, at the top of the international list is the Arab Spring, culminating in the foretellably gruesome death of Colonel Gaddafi. This is coupled with yet another death, that of Bin Laden, that concluded, albeit artificially, the long saga that started on that fateful day, 9/11, when the world turned upside down.

It took a decade to track down Bin Laden and a matter of hours to flush him out, shoot him for resisting arrest and flying him out of Pakistan to a warship in the Indian Ocean from where his body was summarily disposed of.

It rather reminded me of Solomon Grundy; the only difference being that it all happened in six hours and not six days... as for its credibility? Colonel Gaddafi’s grisly end was, I suppose, inevitable.

It was the decision whether or not to publish the photographs of the battered corpses of the two ‘most wanted’ men on the planet that was the subject chosen by the editor of the sixth edition of the Times Picture Annual 2011.

I am, however, not yet convinced, and only time will tell. I could not help recalling Tosca’s utterance over the corpse of Scarpia “e davvanti a lui tremava tutta Roma”. Even the worst and most fearsome of tyrants get their just desserts; at least some of them do.

The Bin Laden and Gaddafi pictures lead me to a related issue; the Japan earthquake pictures that are cataclysmic, but I find that somehow no global disaster has ever had the same devastating effect on our psyche as the tsunami one on Boxing Day 2004.

I tend to think that the more images of these things become readily available the shock element diminishes and we become rather like those medieval folk that made a literal picnic out of a public execution. It is as if the victims, or rather, the protagonists, lose their humanity and become objects over which very little emotion can be expended.

We have, since the development of photojournalism and the internet, been bombarded with a battalion of images that I sometimes fear lower, not heighten our saturation threshold.

The quartet of Times photographers: Darrin Zammit Lupi, Jason Borg, Matthew Mirabelli and Christian Sant Fournier, have, for the sixth consecutive year provided us with a pictorial diary that will remain, for years to come, a fundamental historical reference.

Even now, when we are not quite at the end of current year, I found I had forgotten certain issues and incidents and needed that visual to galvanise my subconscious into action.

My personal favourites are Zammit Lupi’s Roman Centurion having a conversation on his mobile, Matthew Mirabelli’s young tourist in a blizzard of confetti, Christian Sant Fournier’s woman eating a strawberry and Jason Borg’s triumphal return of our William Chetcuti.

There is, however, a plethora of atmospheric shots that bring back such poignant memories like that of Emeritus President Eddie Fenech Adami at the funeral of his wife Mary caught in an extraordinary shot as the coffin filed past him.

Incredible flying shots of footballers looking as if they were executing a difficult pas de deux, not a football tackle, and the composite character studies in the shot of the controversial pastor and the gay protesters – a look at the bemused policemen conveys volumes!

This is a book to savour and enjoy; a book to remind us, even after a decades have passed, of how life was in 2011 and, should The Times and I still be around in 2021, I hope that I will be waiting for issue 16 with alacrity.