The TIME magazine has included the photo of an unexploded Smerch missile in the city of Shushi in Nagorno Karabakh among the Top 100 Photos of 2020. The missile was fired by Azerbaijani forces on October 16.
“The news photos that captured 2020 — shown here in TIME’s annual unranked selection of 100 — almost need no time stamp, so distinctive was its look. Here was a year with the palette of an Arctic winter, variations on a darkness that just goes on and on, time suspended first by lockdowns that threw life out of routine, then by the understanding that nothing would be the same after,” TIME writes.
“Here is a pretty street in the Caucasus Mountains. A boulevard, really. The eye is drawn to leaves going gold in the autumn light and to plastic tape the color of peppermint, stretched to form a cordon around something in the road. It is a missile, launched from the enemy side in a war over a patch of disputed territory, and buried right up to its tail fins in the pavement of a residential street, where, in the year 2020, it stands as a symbol of hope. It didn’t explode,” the TIME correspondent Karl Vick said of the photo of missile.
