A world ablaze, captured by AP photographers in 2021

4 Jan, 2022 10:58 PM5 mins to read

A couple kiss in front of a barricade set on fire by demonstrators during clashes with police in Barcelona. Photo / AP

"Some say the world will end in fire," wrote the poet Robert Frost -- and for much of 2021, Associated Press photographers captured scenes of a world ablaze, amid rumblings of ruin.

In New Delhi, a man sprints amid the funeral pyres of Covid-19 victims -- too many fires, too much heat, too many victims. On a beach near the village of Limni, Greece, the horizon is lit by the flames of wildfires raging across the eastern Mediterranean.

And at La Palma in the Canary Islands, the inferno is in the Cumbre Vieja volcano. But more than 10,000 million cubic metres of ash turn the world into a negative, with black ash taking the place of white snow.

Not all of the combustion is so literal.

There is fury: the astonishing moment when police aimed their guns at rioters trying to break into the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol; Mexican demonstrators against gender violence, hurling themselves at barricades; an Ethiopian woman's wrath as she fights for every split pea in starving, war-torn Tigray.

And there are the sorrowful embers of violence. Stoic Palestinians carry the body of a child who died in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, while a continent away, mourners bear the body of a man killed while protesting the coup in Myanmar. And in Haiti, the wife of slain President Jovenel Moise, Martine, leaves a memorial gathering in black widow's weeds and mask.

There was more to 2021, of course. There was fun: Lady Gaga wore one of the world's largest dresses to Joe Biden's inauguration.

There were moments of hope. Even as millions more died of Covid-19, billions were vaccinated. Health care worker Nazir Ahmed ventured to remote Kashmiri meadows to inoculate shepherds, some of them vaccine resistant. He stands in his protective gear on a hillock, like an emissary from Covid times who somehow found himself in a South Asian remake of The Sound of Music.

There are other images that recall the movies, but askew.

Those men on horseback in 10-gallon hats are not the cowboys of classic Westerns; they're border agents, corralling Haitian migrants as they try to cross the Rio Grande into the United States.

And the man and woman caught in a passionate embrace in Barcelona, Spain, are not characters in a romantic comedy; behind them, a riot rages over the imprisonment of a rapper convicted of insulting the Spanish monarchy. And the streets are on fire.

Ash from the Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands covers a house on Nov. 1, 2021. Scientists estimate the volcano has ejected over 10,000 million cubic metres of ash, jettisoned thousands of meters into the sky.

Police face off against people protesting the rise in gas prices and the policies of President Guillermo Lasso's government in Saquisili, Ecuador, on Oct. 26, 2021.

A gang member points an imaginary weapon at a rival gang on a corner that divides control of two gangs in the Bel Air neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Oct. 5, 2021.

A migrant is comforted by a member of the Spanish Red Cross at the Spanish enclave of Ceuta near the border of Morocco and Spain

People cry out as the body of their relative is recovered from the rubble of a building damaged by an earthquake in Mamuju, West Sulawesi, Indonesia, on Jan. 15, 2021.

Police with guns drawn watch as rioters try to break into the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Jan. 6, 2021.

A house is covered by ash from a volcano that continues to erupt on La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands on Oct. 30, 2021.

Plastic bottles and other garbage float in Potpecko lake near Priboj, in southwest Serbia, on Jan. 22, 2021.

Police beat a woman participating in a protest against the death in prison of Mushtaq Ahmed, a writer who was arrested on charges of violating a sweeping digital security law, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Feb. 26, 2021. Ahmed, 53, was arrested in May 2020 for making comments on social media that criticised how the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was handling the coronavirus pandemic.

Stephen Mudoga, 12, tries to chase away a swarm of locusts on his farm as he returns home from school, at Elburgon, in Nakuru county, Kenya.

A Palestinian man carries an olive tree as he crosses illegally into Israel from the West Bank, through a gap in the separation barrier, south of the West Bank town of Hebron, on March 8, 2021.

Villas on the fronds of the Jumeirah Palm Island in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, are seen from the observation deck of The View at The Palm Jumeirah on April 6, 2021.

A man runs to escape the heat from multiple funeral pyres of Covid-19 victims at a crematorium on the outskirts of New Delhi, India, on April 29, 2021.

An Ethiopian woman argues with others over the allocation of yellow split peas distributed by the Relief Society of Tigray in the town of Agula, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, on May 8, 2021. In war-torn Tigray, it is not just that people are starving; it is that many are being starved.

Switzerland's Marc Hirschi lies on the side of the road after crashing during the first stage of the Tour de France cycling race on June 26, 2021.

A boy submerges himself to cool down at the site of a broken water main on a street in Caracas, Venezuela, on July 27, 2021.

A resident crawls away with a donated bag of rice after residents temporarily overtook a truck loaded with relief supplies, in Vye Terre, Haiti, on Aug. 20, 2021, almost a week after the country's southwestern peninsula was struck by a 7.2 magnitude quake.