A lonely monkey to the dark side of the Moon: Nine of the most striking images of 2026 so far

An expert's guide to the some of the most eye-catching photographs of the year – and how they echo masterpieces from art history.

The photo of once-powerful figures, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores – hunched over in handcuffs and escorted by armed Federal agents in early January – was genuinely arresting. The drama of formidable leaders suddenly stripped of their authority, has long fascinated artists, from the Rococo master Tiepolo (who imagined the capture of Queen Zenobia), to the Victorian painter Charles Eastlake, who portrayed Napoleon as a prisoner on board the HMS Bellerophon in Plymouth Sound.

A stunning aerial image of Bagurumba dancers in traditional attire preparing for a Guinness World Record attempt for the largest-ever performance of the Bodo community's "Butterfly Dance" in January at Sarusajai Stadium in Guwahati, Assam, India, blurred the bodies of the the participants into an uninterruptible pattern of tessellating colour. The melting of rhythmic movement into engrossing geometry echoes the ambition of the pioneering abstract artist Piet Mondrian, who left unfinished on his easel when he died in 1944 an absorbing homage to the evaporative power of music, Victory Boogie Woogie.

The photo of a Ukrainian serviceman snatching a plane-shaped reconnaissance drone from the sky above him near the front lines of the war with Russia in January relied for its power on the ingenious perspective of the photojournalist who took it. Snapped from below, with no other object in the image to provide a sense of relative scale, the serviceman appears to be a giant grabbing an aircraft in mid-flight. The seemingly towering figure recalls the terrifying titan in Goya's painting El Coloso (The Colossus), often interpreted as an allegory of the Spanish War of Independence (Peninsular War).

Phil Noble's photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor being driven away from Aylsham police station in Norfolk after his arrest in February quickly seared itself into cultural consciousness. The shocked expression on the former prince's face – having been questioned about his time as the UK's trade representative between 2001 and 2011 – finds little compelling parallel in any poised portraiture in a museum. It does resemble a textbook illustration of sheer terror, as proposed by Sir Charles Bell in his influential 1806 treatise Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting.

A photo taken in February at the Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Japan, of Punch, a baby Japanese macaque, gazing affectionately into the oversized eyes of a stuffed orangutan sitting beside him, was among the more affecting images captured so far this year. The intensity of Punch's soulful, unrequited stare recalls a series of extraordinary paintings undertaken in the last decades of the 19th Century by German painter and primatologist Gabriel von Max, whose poignant portrait Monkey Before Skeleton, 1900, is invigorated by that same unfulfilled longing for a spark.

Staring through the rose-tinted window of a truck whose bed is piled high with cushions and mattresses, a taut cat appears transfixed by someone or something outside the frame of the photo. The frozen feline accompanies countless Kurdish people displaced during the Syrian civil war as they began to return to their hometowns, following an agreement between Syrian Democratic Forces and the Syrian government. A liminal presence, suspended between exile and home, the rigid cat is moving in its motionlessness. The image calls to mind the trompe l'oeil threshold intensity of the 17th-Century Dutch master Gerard Dou's portrait of his protective and ready-to-pounce pet, Cat on a Ledge, 1657.

In April, a yacht was captured drifting headlong into the vibrant veil of a rainbow as it illuminated Sydney Harbour in front of North Head. The near collision of sailors with the spectral splay of a plunging rainbow's anchor finds a parallel in a similarly close encounter with impalpable resplendence portrayed by the Realist painter Nikolay Nikanorovich Dubovskoy in 1892.

The image of a vulnerable if vibrant Earth slowly sinking behind the ashen surface of a barren Moon (as captured by Nasa astronaut Christina Koch from Artemis II on 6 April), was as instantly iconic as it was disorientating. A lonely sphere suspended precariously in a dark and freezing void, the Earth hasn't seemed so fragile since Hieronymus Bosch imagined it in mid-creation – a fledgling monochrome sphere floating in a vacuum – on the exterior panels of his Garden of Earthly Delights. 

An aerial photo of a vibrant green football pitch in Gaza City, set incongruously amidst the rubble of concrete buildings destroyed during the two-year conflict with Israel, was especially striking. The contrast between the ragged reality of war beyond the perimeter of the dazzlingly precise field echoed the contours of the ancient Persian Chahar Bagh tradition of constructing a geometric oasis of life and cosmic order within a harsh environment. It is seen in a miniature painting from the 16th-Century Baburnama – the memoirs of the first Mughal Emperor, Babur.

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