Taking history: top writers select their photographs of the decade

"Blood, smoke, rubble, floodwater, guns, bodies, riot shields, flame, skyscrapers, more rubble and more floodwater and more blood – is that what the decade was about?" asks Philip Pullman in his contribution to our Review cover story this week. We invited ten writers – Pullman, Simon Schama, Mary Beard, Germaine Greer, Will Self, Blake Morrison, Hilary Mantel, Jeremy Paxman, Pankaj Mishra and Geoff Dyer – to choose an image from two covetable new collections of the most powerful photojournalism from the last 10 years (Decade, edited by Eamonn McCabe and published by Phaidon, and the Guardian's Eyewitness Decade, edited by Roger Tooth).

There is a startling omission from their selection: 9/11. None of our panel chose any photographs of that day – the plane just before it hit the second tower, the crumpling buildings, the office workers dazed and covered in dust, terrified New Yorkers fleeing plumes of smoke, the skeletal stumps of Ground Zero. Maybe this was because everyone wanted to avoid the obvious, or assumed someone else would choose one of these now-iconic images. Or maybe it was a sense, powerfully evident in chronological collections such as these, that the images cannot be viewed in isolation from subsequent events. As Paxman observes, "The Iraq war hangs over this decade like a very bad smell." The war on terror – from the "ball-crunching jeans" photo-op of Bush and Blair walking "shoulder to shoulder" at a snowy Camp David in 2001 to the (equally manipulated, it turns out) shot of the toppling statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 2003 and the chilling picture of blindfolded prisoners being led by a marine through the Iraq sands in 2005 – is in a sense the subject chosen by Morrison, Paxman and Dyer.

Also absent in this selection are the harrowing and all too frequent images of the devastation wreaked by floods, hurricanes and fires across the decade – perhaps because natural disasters are not unique to our time. But there can be few more potent images of elemental catastrophe than Simon Schama's choice of a solitary man in the aftermath of the Abule Egba explosion on Boxing Day 2006. Will Self's macabre pick of a smoking cattle pyre during the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic and Hilary Mantel's frightened, frighteningly sentient-looking monkey at an animal-experimentation laboratory both impart a powerful sense of environmental calamity, and draw on what Self describes as "our divorce from the great balance of the natural world".

More cheeringly, both Philip Pullman and Germaine Greer take consolation in art. Quoting Auden, Pullman writes: "No poem saved a single Jew from the gas chambers. Never mind. Write the poems anyway. Play the music in spite of that." His choice is a picture of Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan orchestra of Seville, which comprises musicians from Israel and its neighbouring Arab countries. They won't bring peace, he writes, but are doing "impossible and profoundly difficult work". Greer opted for Martin Godwin's "elegaic" photograph of Rachel Whiteread's Monument – her site-specific and therefore impermanent sculpture for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2001. "How could we have lost a work so eminently satisfying?" she mourns. And what do cardinals wear under their skirts? Mary Beard takes the decade's "designer atheists" to task with a jolly picture of a line-up of Catholic priests hanging on to their mitres in the wind during the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005.

Pankaj Mishra looks both backwards and forwards in his choice of an apparently unobserved shot of women working in a "slightly superior sweatshop" in China's Hebei province in 2004. For him, the emergence of China as an economic and military world power is ultimately the biggest story of the decade. In terms of images for the future, I was surprised nobody chose any of the photographs of a victorious President Obama, either alone or with his young family. Perhaps this is because the gloss of "hope" (the chapter title Decade gives to 2009) already seems slightly dulled.

My personal selection from these books is one of Doris Lessing in a pose of typically truculent triumph – legs askance, wearing sensible shoes and an expression of defiance – on the step of her West Hampstead terrace house on the morning she was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. I choose this not only because it's one of the few stories here I've had any direct involvement with – however tiny: I was sent to interview Lessing for the third time, for this paper – but also because, as Greer astutely observed, among all the human subjects in both books there are "hundreds maybe thousands of times as many males as females. The women who left their images on the decade are Barbie, Naomi Campbell, Madonna, Britney Spears, Kylie Minogue." Here is a woman neither a model nor a pop star, at the very end of her own ninth decade, indomitable yet proud to be recognised by an establishment to which she always refused to kowtow, and who changed women's lives for the better during the second half of the 20th century.

So that's mine. Please tell us which news photograph from the last 10 years is most resonant for you – for aesthetic, political or personal reasons. Better still, send us your own photos. This was the decade in which photojournalism, along with all other forms of journalism, was revolutionised and democratised by new technologies. As Guardian photographer Eamonn McCabe says: "It now doesn't matter where an image comes from; a mobile phone, a TV camera or the family video. If they are from the right place at the right time they will be see on every front page or TV news programme around the world within hours." Were you in the right place and the right time, with your camera to hand? Have you taken photographs that say something about the last 10 years? Have you documented history in some way? Join us on Flickr as we construct our own visual history of the decade.