18 of the most prominent images of 2025

12. Transit Centre, Buganda

The image of the Congolese refugee sitting on a swing in a transit center near Buganda in May vibrates with a joy that transcends the physical inconveniences she bears witness to: the relentless rain, the rusty steel frame of abandoned playground equipment, the broken bench dangling beside her. With the woman among more than 70,000 people who have crossed the border into Burundi since January, her spirit defies her difficult circumstances. Place the image next to French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s famous painting The Swing (1767), and you do away with the gentle frivolity of the famous work, reclaiming the swing as a timeless prop of joy and inner peace, suspended outside of space and time.

Tayfun Coskun/Anatolia/Getty Images

13. Meteor shower, Inverness, California

The photo of the Eta Aquarid meteor shower as it streaked across the night sky over Inverness, California, in the early hours of May 6, was both inspiring and humbling. The glow of a small village is dwarfed by the bright blur of the Milky Way above it, appearing as little more than a flickering footnote in a vast cosmic drama. The poignant contrast between human and celestial scales is reminiscent of Adam Alsheimer’s pioneering painting, The Flight into Egypt (ca. 1609), which was celebrated for its pioneering astronomical accuracy. In Elsheimer’s work, the Holy Family occupies only a small part of the foreground as the eye is drawn upward toward the enormous night sky. Both images, centuries apart, attest not only to contemporary advances in optics but also to the permanence of awe.

Leon Neal/Getty Images

14. Eyes covered in oil, London

An activist from the direct action campaign group Free Fossil London covered her eyes with a non-greasy, oil-like substance as she stood outside the offices of energy company Shell in May. Shell’s sale of its onshore oil assets in Nigeria – a move that protesters claim enables the company to escape responsibility for accidents in the Niger Delta – sparked the demonstrations. The company denies any wrongdoing. The pose of the gang calls to mind George Frederic Watts’s 1886 Symbolist painting “Hope,” in which a woman with hooded eyes appears, sitting atop a fuzzy ball, playing a mournful harp.

Maddy Meyer/Getty Images

15. Diving swimmer, Singapore

An almost immersive water-level photo of Chinese swimmer Tianchen Lan, competing in the open water relay at the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore on July 20. The athlete froze mid-dive as he arced from a platform above the sea. The bold props of blue – sky, water, platforms – and the striking suspension of the athlete’s body are reminiscent of seemingly disparate aspects of the imagination of French conceptual artist Yves Klein: Klein’s 1957 creation of uniquely intense colour, International Klein Blue, and his 1960 photomontage Leaping into the Void. The latter creates the illusion that his body descends precariously from the roof of Paris to the street below, like the image of Singapore, placing body and abyss as one.

Phil Majako/AFP/Getty Images

16. Ballet students, Tembisa, South Africa

The photo of 5-year-old ballet students, Vilasande Ngcobo and Yamihle Gwababa, taken in July outside a dance academy in Tembisa, South Africa, was poignant and poignant. The stark contrast between dry earth, sculpted shadow and delicate dresses is reminiscent of the strict aesthetic angles of Degas’s countless scenes of dancers in training. By keeping our eyes focused on the gestural allure of ballerinas, Degas often abstracted dance studios into spaces of empty color, investing his paintings, like the picture from outside Johannesburg, with a timeless dimension.

Getty Images

17. The emaciated child, Gaza City

A series of devastating images of emaciated children hugging their mothers in Gaza City in July shocked the world. BBC News reported that according to the United Nations Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA), one in five children in Gaza City suffers from malnutrition. The publication of this photo sparked controversy, after it was claimed that the child who appears in the photo also suffers from pre-existing medical problems that may explain his poor physical condition. While there are countless images in art history of mothers comforting their distressed children, from Dutch artist Gabriel Mezzo’s The Sick Child of 1665, to Pablo Picasso’s pastel and charcoal painting The Deprived of 1903, such images as the one taken in Gaza cannot be compared in painting or sculpture. No visual invention of suffering or pathos by any artist, no matter how talented or revered, can adequately encapsulate the magnitude of the incomprehensible pain recorded in these recent images.

Thanassis Stavrakis/AFP

18. Sheep rescue, Patras, Greece

Against the backdrop of mystical smoke rising from the forest fires that struck Patras in August, a man on a motorbike is seen rescuing a sheep that has been clinging to it for dear life. This gesture refers to early images of the Good Shepherd in Roman catacombs of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, in which Christ carries a limp animal on his shoulders. Throughout the ages, this recurring motif – whether preserved in a fresco or captured in a photograph – reinforces the enduring mythical nature of heroism.

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This article has been updated to provide additional context regarding the emaciated child in Gaza.

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