From praying monks and snorkelers to meteor showers and Pope Francis's tomb, these are 11 of the most striking and memorable images of the year so far.

1. Monks praying, Thailand

A photo of monks praying beneath the vast golden dome of Wat Phra Dhammakaya during the annual Makha Bucha ceremony in February is awe-inspiring in its ethereal glow.

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

Its unreal glow evokes the contours of a 19th-century Burmese manuscript depicting the Buddha’s first sermon in Deer Park, where monks and animals crowd around his resplendent figure.

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

2. Water Parade, Venice

Photos of a giant papier-mache rat, dripping confetti and gliding down the Grand Canal in the water parade that traditionally opens the Venice Carnival in February, captured the scene in a flash of vibrant color.

A rodent turned spectacle, the floating “Pantegana” imaginatively emerges from the city’s sewers as an emblem of Venice’s comical side.

With bursts of color, the rat offers a bright, grotesque contrast to the elegant luminous veil that envelops Venice in countless paintings, such as Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac’s 1905 Entrance to the Grand Canal.

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

3. Pope Francis' Tomb, Rome

A photo taken in April of Pope Francis' tomb in Rome—the first burial of a pontiff outside the Vatican in more than a century—on which a solitary white rose has been placed, was exquisitely evocative.

The austere stone slab appears to shudder in the dim light of the crypt.

The transcription of the eloquent penumbra offered by the photo evokes the atmosphere of a 1798 drawing by J.M.W. Turner of Cardinal Morton's tomb in Canterbury Cathedral.

Turner's graphite-on-paper drawing is perceived as illuminated by an ever-deepening inner glow, toward which our eyes open, petal by petal. Both images see the stone, like death, as permeable, unfinished.

4. Migrant Worker, Chandigarh, India

There’s something inescapably archetypal about this April photo of a migrant worker stopping to drink water while harvesting wheat on the outskirts of Chandigarh, India.

The worker’s upraised cup and sickle, gleaming against the golden glow of the grain, evoke the iconic figure of the lone reaper in Winslow Homer’s 1865 “The Veteran in a New Field.”

In Homer’s work, a Union veteran wields a scythe against a sea of ??wheat in a fable of national reckoning in the wake of the American Civil War.

Both images situate their subjects between allegory and labor, reaping not only the grain but also the enduring promise of renewal.

5. Robotic Hand, Beijing

The image of a young woman reaching out to touch the slowly opening index finger of a massive robotic hand was captured during a press tour for Beijing’s Robot World in April.

The photo’s dramatic lighting and the figure’s all-black attire conspire to reduce the sense of human presence to mere flickers of flesh: floating forearms and a small profile suspended in darkness.

At first glance, the close contact might evoke Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” or perhaps better still, M.C. Escher’s enigmatic drawing of hands drawing hands (1948).

In the age of AI, the line between creator and created is increasingly difficult to draw.

6. Transit Center, Buganda

The image of a Congolese refugee woman sitting on a swing at a transit center near Buganda in May vibrates with a joy that transcends the material discomforts she witnesses: the incessant rain, the rusted steel frame of the abandoned playground, and the broken seat dangling by her side.

This woman, among the more than 70,000 people who have crossed into Burundi since January, is shown to have a spirit that defies difficult circumstances.

By placing the photo next to the famous painting “The Swing” (1767) by the French Rococo artist Jean-Honore Fragonard, she strips away the courtly frivolity of the famous work, reclaiming the swing as a timeless element of joy and inner peace, suspended outside of space and time.

7. Meteor Shower, Inverness, California

A photograph capturing the Eta Aquarid meteor shower as it streaked across the night sky over Inverness, California, in the early morning of May 6 was both inspiring and humbling.

Eclipsed by the blurry glimmer of the Milky Way above it, the glow of a small village seems little more than a flickering footnote in a vast cosmic drama.

The poignant contrast between human and celestial scales recalls Adam Elsheimer’s groundbreaking painting “The Flight into Egypt” (c. 1609), celebrated for its pioneering astronomical accuracy.

In Elsheimer’s work, the Holy Family occupies only a fraction of the foreground as the gaze rises toward the immense night sky. Both images, centuries apart, testify not only to contemporary advances in optics, but also to the perenniality of wonder.

8. Oil-Covered Eyes, London

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

Shell’s sale of its onshore oil assets in Nigeria—a move protesters say allows it to evade responsibility for accidents in the Niger Delta—triggered the demonstration.

The company denies wrongdoing. The blindfolded pose evokes George Frederic Watts’s 1886 Symbolist painting “Hope,” in which a woman, her eyes covered, sits on a murky globe, plaintively playing a lyre.

9. Diving Swimmer, Singapore

A nearly immersive, water-level photo of Chinese swimmer Tianchen Lan, competing in an open water relay at the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore on July 20, freezes the athlete mid-dive as she arcs off an ultramarine platform.

The bold confluence of blues (sky, water, and platform) and the striking suspension of the athlete’s body evoke seemingly disparate aspects of French conceptual artist Yves Klein’s imagination: his 1957 creation of a singularly intense hue, International Klein Blue, and his 1960 photomontage “Leap into the Void.”

The latter creates the illusion of her body falling perilously from a Paris rooftop to the street below, like the Singapore photo, positing the body and the abyss as one.

10. Ballet students, Tembisa, South Africa

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, is striking and heartwarming.

The stark contrast between the parched ground, the chiseled shadow, and the delicate dresses evokes the rigorous aesthetic angularities of Degas's countless scenes of dancers rehearsing.

With his gaze fixed on the gestural gravity of his dancers, Degas often abstracted dance studios into bands of white, giving his paintings, like the photo of the outskirts of Johannesburg, a timeless dimension.

11. Starving Child, Gaza City

A sequence of devastating images of emaciated children cradled in their mothers’ arms in Gaza City in July shocked the world.

According to UN-backed experts, the worst-case scenario – a famine – is currently unfolding in Gaza.

While countless images exist in art history of mothers comforting grieving children – from Dutch artist Gabriel Metsu’s “The Sick Child” (1665) to Pablo Picasso’s “The Disinherited” (1903) – photos like those captured in Gaza are unparalleled in painting or sculpture.

No visual invention of suffering or compassion, by any artist, no matter how talented or revered, can adequately encapsulate the scale of the unfathomable anguish captured in these recent photos.