The tension between Trump’s carefully choreographed outward appearance – his unrumpled suit and controlled expression – and the chaos known to be raging around him was transfixing. Shortly before the photo was taken, the surrounding streets had been forcibly cleared of peaceful demonstrators who had gathered to protest the death of George Floyd (a black man killed in police custody a month earlier). President Trump holds a Bible outside a boarded-up church, Washington DC, 1 June 2020įew photos captured this year, or excited more divisive reactions than the image of US President Donald Trump raising a Bible while standing in front of a boarded-up St John’s Church, opposite the White House in Washington DC. Hirst’s controversial work breached the norms of contemporary sculpture by blurring the line between a mere metaphor for breaking the barrier between being and death and a physical embodiment of that ultimate transition – slowed down by chemicals, like Fallows’ snap, to an eternal millisecond.
Preserved forever by the blink of Fallow’s lens, the breath-taking levitation of the hulking creature brought to mind British artist Damien Hirst’s career-defining installation of a toothy tiger shark floating in a vitrine of formaldehyde, to which Hirst attached the quizzical title The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). No wonder Chris Fallow’s photograph of a great white shark, suspended 4.5m (15ft) above the waves near Seal Island, South Africa, in August 2020 – the highest shark breach thought to have ever been recorded – immediately went viral. Related to ‘break’, ‘breach’ captures not only the gravity defiance of the act itself, but the shattering of the liquid plane that once restrained the creature as it begins ascending through the air. ‘Breach’ is the preferred word for the leap that whales and sharks make from the surface of water. Breaching great white shark, South Africa, August 2020
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