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Diving swimmers to meteor showers: 12 of the most striking images of 2025 so far

From praying monks and two pair in pokerdiving swimmers to meteor showers and the tomb of Pope Francis, these are 12 of the most eye-catching and memorable images of the year so far.

Warning: This article contains imagery that some may find distressing.

A photo of monks praying beneath the vast golden dome of Wat Phra Dhammakaya during the yearly ceremony of Makha Bucha in February is breathtaking in its ethereal glow. Tens of thousands of monks and devotees, many holding lanterns, assemble to commemorate the Buddha's first great teaching. Its unreal radiance calls to mind the contours of a 19th-Century Burmese manuscript depicting the Buddha's first sermon at the Deer Park, where monks and animals cluster around his resplendent form. Both images capture the devotion of communities determined to honour and be transformed.

Photos of a giant, confetti-exploding papier-maché rat, drifting down the Grand Canal in the water parade that traditionally opens the Venice Carnival in February, captured the scene in a shatter of vibrating colour. Rodent-turned-spectacle, the floating "Pantegana" emerges imaginatively from the city's drains as an emblem of Venice's comic underbelly. Disgorging bursts of colour, the rat offers a grotesquely glittery foil to the elegantly luminous shroud that veils Venice in countless paintings, such as neo-Impressionist Paul Signac's Entrance to the Grand Canal, 1905. In both images, Venice dissolves into a mosaic of pixelated light.

A photo taken in April of the tomb of Pope Francis in Rome – the first interment of a pontiff outside the Vatican in over a century – on which was laid a single white rose, was exquisitely haunting. The stark stone slab seems to shudder in fusty crypt light. The photo's transcription of the eloquent gloom echoes the evocative mood of a 1798 drawing by JMW Turner of Cardinal Morton's tomb in Canterbury Cathedral. Turner's graphite-on-paper drawing feels lit by an ever-deepening inner radiance, which our eyes peel their way towards, one petal at a time. Both images see stone, like death, as permeable, inconclusive.

There is something inescapably archetypal about the photo taken in April of a migrant worker pausing to drink water while harvesting wheat on the outskirts of Chandigarh, India. The worker's raised cup and sickle, glinting against the golden glow of grain, evoke the emblematic figure of the lone harvester in Winslow Homer's The Veteran in a New Field, 1865. In Homer's work, a Union veteran wields a scythe against a sea of wheat in a fable of national reckoning after the US Civil War. Both images locate their subjects between allegory and labour, harvesting not only grain but the enduring promise of renewal.

The image of a young woman reaching up to touch the slowly unclenching index finger of an enormous robot hand was captured during a press tour of Beijing's World of Robots in April. The photo's dramatic lighting and the figure's black clothing conspire to diminish the sense of human presence to mere flickers of flesh: floating forearms and a sliver of profile suspended in darkness. At first glance, the near contact may evoke Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, or perhaps, better still, MC Escher's riddling drawing of hands drawing hands (1948). In the age of AI, the line between creator and created is harder and harder to grasp.

The image of a Congolese refugee sitting on a swing at a Transit centre near Buganda in May, vibrates with a joy that transcends the material discomforts to which it attests: the relentless rain, the rusting steel frame of the abandoned playground equipment, and the broken seat dangling beside her. With the woman among more than 70,000 people who crossed into Burundi since January, her spirit defies her difficult circumstances. Set the photo beside French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard's famous painting The Swing (1767), and it strips away the courtly frivolity of the famous work, reclaiming the swing as a timeless prop of playfulness and inner peace, suspended outside of space and time.

A photo capturing the Eta Aquariid meteor shower as it slashed through the night sky over Inverness, California, in the early hours of 6 May, was at once inspiring and humbling. Dwarfed by the glimmering blur of the Milky Way above it, the glow of a small hamlet appears little more than a flickering footnote in a vast cosmic drama. The affecting contrast between human and heavenly scales recalls Adam Elsheimer's groundbreaking painting, The Flight into Egypt (c 1609), celebrated for its pioneering astronomical precision. In Elsheimer's work, the Holy Family occupies only a fraction of the foreground as the eye is drawn upward to the immense night sky. Both images, centuries apart, attest not just to contemporary advances in optics but the perenniality of awe.

Covering her eyes in an unctuous, oil-like substance, an activist from the direct-action campaign group Fossil Free London placed herself outside the offices of the Shell energy company in May. Shell's sale of its onshore oil assets in Nigeria – a move that protesters allege enables the company to dodge responsibility for accidents in the Niger Delta – triggered the demonstration. The company denies wrongdoing. The blindfold pose calls to mind George Frederic Watts' Symbolist painting Hope, 1886, in which a woman, eyes covered, sits atop a murky globe, plucking a doleful lyre.

An almost immersive, water-level photo of Chinese swimmer Tianchen Lan, competing in an open-water relay at the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore on 20 July, freezes the athlete in mid-dive as he arcs from an ultramarine platform. The bold abutment of blues –? sky, water, and platform – and the arresting suspension of the athlete's body recall seemingly disparate aspects of French conceptual artist Yves Klein's imagination: Klein's creation in 1957 of a singularly intense hue, International Klein Blue, and his 1960 photomontage Leap into the Void. The latter creates the illusion of his body perilously plummeting from a Paris rooftop to the street below, like the Singapore photo, positing the body and the abyss as one.

A photo of two 5-year-old ballet students, Philasande Ngcobo and Yamihle Gwababa, posing in July outside a dance academy in Tembisa, South Africa, was powerful and touching. The stark contrast between parched ground, chiselled shadow and delicate dresses recalls the rigorous aesthetic angularities of Degas's countless scenes of dancers in rehearsal. Keeping our eye fixed on the gestural gravity of his ballerinas, Degas often abstracted the dancing studios to swathes of blank colour, investing his paintings, like the photo from outside Johannesburg, with a timeless dimension.

A sequence of devastating images of emaciated children, cradled in the arms of their mothers in Gaza City in July, shocked the world. According to UN-backed experts, the "worst-case scenario" of famine is currently playing out in Gaza. While there are countless images in art history of mothers comforting afflicted children, from Dutch artist Gabri?l Metsu's The Sick Child, 1665, to Pablo Picasso's pastel and charcoal drawing The Disinherited Ones, 1903, such photos as those captured in Gaza are without possible parallel in painting or sculpture. No visual invention of suffering or pity by any artist, however gifted or revered, can adequately encapsulate the scale of unfathomable anguish chronicled in these recent photos.

12: Sheep rescue, Patras, Greece

Against a backdrop of woolly smoke billowing from the wildfires that struck Patras in August, a man on a motorcycle is seen rescuing a sheep that clings to him for dear life. The gesture recalls early depictions of the Good Shepherd in the Roman catacombs of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, where Christ shoulders a vulnerable animal. Across ages, the recurring motif – whether preserved in fresco or captured in a photograph – reinforces the enduring mythical nature of heroism.

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