The 10 most surprising images of 2025

The image of a giant papier-mâché mouse exploding into confetti, floating on Venice’s Grand Canal during the water parade that traditionally opens the February carnival, is an explosion of vibrant color.

The rodent-turned-spectacle, the floating “Pantegana” (mouse), creatively emerges from the city sewers as an emblem of Venice’s comedic side.

With its explosions of color, the mouse provides a brilliant contrast to the elegantly luminous veil that envelops Venice in countless paintings, such as “The Entrance to the Grand Canal” from 1905 by Paul Signac, an exponent of neo-impressionism.

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

The image of a Congolese refugee, sitting on a swing at a transit center near Buganda in May, expresses a joy that overcomes the material discomforts around her: the incessant rain, the rusted steel frame of abandoned children’s toys, and the broken seat hanging beside her.

Among the more than 70,000 people who have crossed the Burundian border since January, this woman’s spirit defies the difficult circumstances in which she finds herself.

If we were to place the photo next to French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s famous painting, The Swing (1767), we would take away the lightness of the famous work, making the swing a timeless symbol of pleasure and inner peace.

With her face covered in an oily substance, an activist from direct action group Fossil Free London stood outside the offices of energy company Shell in May.

Shell’s sale of its onshore oil assets in Nigeria – a move that protesters say allows the company to escape responsibility for accidents in the Niger Delta – was the reason for the protest, while the company denies acting improperly.

The blindfolded pose is reminiscent of symbolist painting Hopeby George Frederic Watts, from 1886, in which a woman with covered eyes sits on a dark globe while playing a melancholy lyre.

The image of two 5-year-old ballet students, Philasande Ngcobo and Yamihle Gwababa, posing in July at the dance academy in Tembisa, South Africa, is moving and impactful.

The stark contrast between the dry earth, defined shadows and delicate dresses recalls the aesthetic of the countless scenes of ballerinas in rehearsal painted by Degas.

Keeping his gaze fixed on the gestural expressiveness of his dancers, Degas often abstracted dance studios into large areas of uniform color, giving his paintings, as well as his photographs taken in the suburbs of Johannesburg, a timeless dimension.

A series of heartbreaking images of children in their mothers’ arms 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 were malnourished.

The publication of this image caused controversy, as the child depicted in the photograph also suffered from pre-existing health conditions.

Although there are countless images in art history of mothers comforting their sick children, The sick childby Gabriël Metsu, from 1665, until The powerlessa pastel and charcoal drawing by Pablo Picasso from 1903, photographs like those captured in Gaza bear no comparison to painting or sculpture.

No visual representation of suffering or compassion, no matter how talented or renowned the artist, can adequately capture the magnitude of anguish documented by these recent photos.

An extraordinary image taken by astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy, showing the silhouette of a fellow skydiver aligned with the intensely textured disk of the morning Arizona sun on November 8, has captured the imagination of the world.

There was no margin for error. Each element of the maneuver, carefully planned, had to take place in perfect synchronization, from the position of the Sun in the sky to the precise moment of the jump and the acrobatics.

Quickly named The fall of Icarusin reference to the Greek myth of the young man whose wings melted when flying too close to the Sun, photography dialogues with a long tradition in the history of art, from Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in the 16th century, to Henri Matisse, in the 20th century, of representing the tragic fall of the young man who dared to go too far.

An image of a protester in Istanbul, dressed in traditional dervish clothing – usually associated with Sufi mysticism – facing a battalion of heavily equipped police using pepper spray went viral in March.

Turkey’s most intense political conflicts of the decade were sparked by the arrest and detention of Istanbul’s mayor, a figure seen by many as a rival to President Erdogan.

The visual juxtaposition of a seemingly stoic and immobile individual, linked to the non-violent spiritual practice of dervish dancing, and the armed forces of the order is striking.

The dervishes’ iconic top hat and long, layered tunics, both rich in symbolism of death and rebirth, elevated the image from a simple street protest to something mythical.