12 of the most striking images of 2025 so far

From praying monks and meteor showers to famine in the Gaza Strip and Pope Francis' tomb, here are 12 of the most memorable and surprising images of the year so far.

Important: This article contains images that may be disturbing to some readers.

The ethereal glow of the image of monks praying beneath the immense golden dome of Wat Phra Dhammakaya temple in Thailand during the annual Makha Bucha ceremony in February is breathtaking.

Tens of thousands of monks and devotees, many carrying lanterns, gather to commemorate Buddha's first great teaching.

Its unreal radiance brings to mind the contours of a 19th-century Burmese manuscript illustrating Buddha's first sermon in the Deer Park, where monks and animals gather around his resplendent form.

Both images capture the devotion of communities determined to revere and be transformed.

In February, photos of a giant papier-mâché rat exploding with confetti as it sailed down the Grand Canal in the traditional water parade that opens the Venice Carnival in Italy captured the scene in a burst of vibrant color.

The floating Pantegana (the rodent turned spectacle) creatively emerges from the city's waters, as a symbol of Venice's dark and comical side.

By throwing jets of color, the mouse offers a grotesque sheet of glitter over the luminous and elegant mantle that covers the city in countless paintings, such as Entrance to the Grand Canal (1905), by the neo-impressionist painter Paul Signac (1863-1935).

In both images, Venice dissolves into a mosaic of light pixels.

The photo taken in April of the tomb of Pope Francis (1936-2025) in Rome, Italy, with a simple white rose on its slab, is exquisite and haunting.

Francis was the first pontiff to be buried outside the Vatican in more than a century.

The sober stone slab seems to tremble in the dim light of the crypt.

The eloquent gloom portrayed by the photo recalls the evocative tone of a 1798 drawing of the tomb of Cardinal John Morton (c.1420-1500) in Canterbury Cathedral, UK, by JMW Turner (1775-1851).

Made with graphite on paper, the drawing seems to be illuminated by an internal radiance, towards which our eyes seem to make their way, one petal at a time.

Both images depict the stone as permeable and inconclusive, like death.

It's impossible to escape the archetype in this photo taken in April of a migrant worker pausing to drink water during the wheat harvest outside Chandigarh in northwest India.

The raised cup and the sickle, shining against the golden wheat, evoke the emblematic figure of the isolated worker in the painting The Veteran in a New Field (1865), by Winslow Homer (1836-1910).

In it, a Union veteran wields a scythe against a sea of ​​wheat. It's a fable about the national reckoning after the American Civil War (1861–1865).

The two images position the portrayed between allegory and work, harvesting not only grain, but the promise of permanent renewal.

The image of a young woman raising her arm to touch the index finger of a huge, slowly opening robotic hand was captured in April during a press visit to Robot World in the Chinese capital, Beijing.

The photo's startling lighting and the young woman's black clothing combine to reduce the sense of human presence to mere flickers of skin, like floating forearms and a partial profile suspended in darkness.

At first glance, the close contact might recall Michelangelo's (1475-1564) The Creation of Adam . Or perhaps, and even better, the mysterious drawing of hands drawing hands (1948) by MC Escher (1898-1972).

In the age of artificial intelligence, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the line between creator and creature.

In May, the image of a Congolese refugee sitting on a swing at a transit center near Buganda, Burundi, conveys a joy that transcends the material discomfort she witnesses, such as the incessant rain, the abandoned swing's corroded steel frame, and the broken seat dangling beside her.

The woman is one of more than 70,000 people who have crossed the border from the Democratic Republic of the Congo into Burundi since January. Her state of mind defies the difficult circumstances.

If we place the photo next to the famous work The Swing (1767), by the French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), it abstracts the elegant frivolity of the painting, reconquering the swing as a timeless accessory of play and inner peace, suspended far from time and space.

The photo captures the Eta Aquariid meteor shower, which streaked across the night sky over Inverness, California, in the early hours of May 6. It's both inspiring and humbling.

Eclipsed by the blurred glow of the Milky Way, the glow of a small village seems little more than a shimmering footnote in a vast cosmic drama.

The disturbing contrast between human and celestial scales recalls Adam Elsheimer's (1578-1610) revolutionary painting Flight into Egypt (c. 1609), known for its pioneering astronomical accuracy.

In Elsheimer's work, the Holy Family occupies only a fraction of the foreground, while the eye is drawn upwards by the immense night sky.

The two images, produced centuries apart, attest not only to contemporary advances in optics, but also to the enduring fascination with night scenes.

Covering her eyes with a thick, oily substance, an activist from the group Fossil Free London stood outside the offices of the energy company Shell in May.

Protesters argue that Shell's decision to sell its onshore oil assets in Nigeria allows the company to avoid responsibility for the accidents in the Niger Delta. It was this decision that sparked the protests.

The company denies any wrongdoing.

The closed-eyes pose recalls the painting Hope (1886) by the symbolist George Frederic Watts (1817-1904). In it, a blindfolded woman sits on a shadowy globe, melancholically strumming a lyre.

The photo taken at water level of Chinese swimmer Tianchen Lan competing in an open water relay during the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore on July 20 is almost immersive.

It freezes the athlete in mid-dive as he leans over an underwater platform.

The bold encounter of shades of blue (sky, water and platform) and the surprising suspension of the athlete's body recall seemingly unrelated aspects of the imagination of the French conceptual artist Yves Klein (1928-1962): the creation of a particularly intense shade, called International Klein Blue, in 1957, and his photomontage Leap into the Void (1960).

This work creates the illusion of his body falling dangerously from a rooftop in Paris, France, onto the street below. As in the Singapore photo, he positions the body and the abyss as one.

This touching and powerful photo shows two five-year-old ballet students, Philasande Ngcobo and Yamihle Gwababa, posing in July outside a dance academy in Tembisa, near Johannesburg, South Africa.

The stark contrast between the parched ground, the sculpted shadow, and the delicate dresses recalls the rigorous aesthetic angularities of the countless scenes of dancers rehearsing by the French painter Edgar Degas (1834-1917).

Keeping our gaze fixed on the gravity of the dancers' gestures, Degas often abstracted the dance studios in swathes of white, giving his paintings, like the photo in South Africa, a timeless dimension.

A series of devastating images of skeletal children cradled in their mothers' arms in Gaza City in July shocked the world.

Experts supported by the United Nations have said that the "worst-case scenario" of famine is currently unfolding in the Gaza Strip.

There are countless images of mothers comforting distressed children throughout art history. They range from The Sick Child (1665) by Dutch artist Gabriël Metsu (1629–1667) to the charcoal and pastel drawing The Forsaken (1903) by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973).

But the photographs taken in Gaza have no parallel in painting or sculpture.

No visual creation of suffering or compassion, by any artist, however gifted or revered, can adequately encapsulate the unfathomable scale of anguish recorded in recent photographs from the Gaza Strip.

Against a backdrop of smoke rising from the wildfires that hit Patras, Greece, in August, a man on a motorcycle rescues a sheep, which is clinging to him for dear life.

The gesture recalls ancient illustrations of the Good Shepherd in the Roman catacombs, from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. They show Jesus Christ with a vulnerable animal on his shoulders.

Throughout time, this is a recurring motif, preserved in frescoes or captured in photographs. It reinforces the solid legendary nature of heroism.

Read the original version of this report (in English) on the BBC Culture website .