2026 Photo Awards: The extraordinary ordinary
The pictures featured in this year’s photo awards are simply sublime
The English poet and printmaker William Blake saw angels in the treetops, spoke with his fellow poet John Milton — who died 83 years before Blake was born — and received insightful tips about engraving from his brother Robert, also dead.
As evidenced by his luminous poetry and prints, Blake was a visionary, someone with an eye for the miraculous, even when mired in the mundane. The photographers featured in this issue possess a comparable talent, but rather than rely on an assist from the seraphim, they use a camera to detect the wonders of daily life that are hiding in plain sight.
In Vienna, Luca Venturi lowered his lens and trained it on two pairs of poised legs, a wheel of yellow daffodils, and a child contemplating whatever it is children see when left alone with their thoughts.
Walking down a busy street in Taiwan, Yuan-Lung Hsieh strolled by a department store window; unlike other passersby, he stopped, pointed his camera, and caught the image of a shimmering wedding gown half hidden behind silken drapes.
In Oregon, JoEllen Reif turned a camera toward her granddaughter Willa standing wide-eyed in a doorway and immortalized an angel imbued with golden light.
William Blake celebrated that rare ability “to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower.” The 13 photographs gathered here demonstrate that it’s not only visionary poets who can capture the magic of everyday moments that might have otherwise gone unobserved.
Winner
LUCA VENTURI, Rotary Club of Siena Est, Italy
In a quiet corner of Vienna, as spring flowers bloom within a circular planter and two women converse against a stone balustrade — their personalities and presence suggested only by their stance and attire — a solitary child, sitting slightly apart, lingers within her private world. How I got the shot: What drew me in was the contrast between the composed presence of the adults and the lone child absorbed in her own small gesture. I waited briefly for the right balance — when the child’s posture, the feet, and the compositional elements aligned naturally — and then captured the image.
Winner, People of Action
JENO JOHNSON, Rotary Club of Tiruchirapalli Chola, India
At a free medical outreach camp supported by Dr. K. Manoharan — a member of the Rotary Club of Tiruchirapalli Midtown and a Major Donor to The Rotary Foundation — a woman clasps her hands in gratitude for the compassionate care she has received. For the residents of the agricultural communities served by the camp, this was their only access to advanced medical care. How I got the shot: I’m a wedding photographer and good at anticipating moments and being ready in the right place with the right lens. I was watching for emotional moments at the camp, so when I saw this woman literally in tears, I acted quickly to catch her as she thanked the doctor (Manoharan’s son). I was emotional too and got goose bumps.
The ecstatic moment when the photographer’s son Isaac splashed in the ocean for the first time. How I got the shot: My wife, Jessica, and I went to Puerto Rico with our two sons, Eli and Isaac, after the loss of our third son, Saul, at birth. In search of healing, we chose to travel to the sunlit ocean rather than linger in an empty-feeling house and endure a dark, cold Minnesota winter. I truly believe the trip provided a genuine benefit to us all.
ERIC STRAND, Rotary Club of Fergus Falls Sunrise, Minnesota
The moon rises over a monolithic iceberg in Lazarev Bay in Antarctica. The sky’s pinkish glow is a phenomenon known as the Belt of Venus, which is caused by the redirection of sunlight by atmospheric particles. The blue sky below the Belt of Venus is caused by Earth’s shadow hitting the atmosphere. How I got the shot: I took this photo while sailing on the National Geographic Endurance. Although there was an entire field of icebergs, I looked for a distinctive, monumental one. It needed to be the main visual element of the composition, and I wanted to time my shot to get the most aesthetically pleasing relationship between the iceberg and the moon.
MIKE LIEBMAN, Rotary Club of Denver Cherry Creek, Colorado
The Rotary Club of Monrovia Suonu went to Liberia’s Margibi County to deliver school supplies to Julia Grace Academy, which educates and boards 800 children. At recess, students surrounded the Rotarians and began mugging for the camera. How I got the shot: The energy at Julia Grace Academy was so pure and genuine. I was simply blessed with the opportunity to catch images of children being children. As I tried to photograph candid moments, the children flocked around and showed me their coolest poses. They may not understand the significance of being at the academy — which is truly teaching future nation-builders — but their demeanor and confidence are clearly visible in this photo.
GEORGE BROWNELL, Rotary Club of Monrovia Suonu, Liberia
As the sun rises outside a roadside café in California’s Sonoma County, morning dew bejewels an intricately woven spiderweb.
MARK CAMPBELL, Rotary Club of Santa Rosa Sunrise, California
A woman makes her way through a courtyard of the 16th-century Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque in the heart of Sarajevo’s historic Ottoman-era market area. While the Bosnian city today is home to skyscrapers, modern avenues, and a mix of cultures, the narrow lanes of Baščaršija, Sarajevo’s old bazaar, are a living repository of the city’s history and traditions. How I got the shot: I spent time observing the interaction of people outside the mosque, seeking moments that embodied Sarajevo’s way of life. In this image, I focused on a young woman with a guarded expression, which contrasts with that of the older man in the background. In this everyday moment, there’s a sense of the connection and perhaps tension across generations.
JOHN BUTTERFIELD, Rotary Club of Dublin-Worthington, Ohio
Monstrous waves whipped by a winter gale explode after hitting a breakwater off Lake Michigan’s eastern shoreline, dwarfing a 57-foot-tall, 102-year-old lighthouse in Ludington, Michigan. The force of a Great Lakes storm is not to be underestimated; gales can turn into hurricane-force winds and have caused thousands of shipwrecks.
STEVE BEGNOCHE, Rotary Club of Ludington, Michigan
Indifferent to the riot of color that surrounds it, a determined duck paddles across the lake that lies at the base of the majestic, 14,000-foot-tall Maroon Bells. Situated within the White River National Forest about 10 miles southwest of Aspen, Colorado, the twin peaks get their distinctive reddish-purple coloring from iron-bearing rocks that have oxidized over millions of years.
TERRI LATTA, Rotary Club of Lake Norman/Huntersville, North Carolina
Embodying a guardian spirit, a masked dancer performs in a Bhuta Kola ritual in Puttur, India. Dressed in elaborate makeup, costumes, towering headgear, and ornaments, dancers in this annual ritual enter a trance to become the spirit itself. With drums, chants, and fire, the intense and deeply spiritual performance reaffirms the community’s sacred bond with its ancestral guardians.
SHRAVAN M., Rotaract Club of Shimoga North Elite, India
In the bustling port city of Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan, a woman with a pink umbrella walks past a store window where a partially hidden wedding gown offers a tantalizing promise of potential happiness.
YUAN-LUNG HSIEH, Rotary Club of Tainan Cherng-Ta, Taiwan
As he paddles across Lake Superior, a kayaker does double duty as a cameraman, using an overhead drone to photograph his buoyant voyage and the crazily concentric aquamarine ripples left in the wake of his bright orange watercraft.
KENJI OGURA, Rotary Club of Duluth Superior Eco, Minnesota
On her seventh birthday, Willa Talbot daydreams in a sunny doorway while vacationing with her family at Black Butte Ranch in central Oregon. “Sometimes a photograph can bring such joy,” says Willa’s grandmother JoEllen Reif. “This one made me and my family very happy.”
JOELLEN REIF, Spouse of William Reif, Rotary Club of Canby, Oregon
This story originally appeared in the June 2026 issue of Rotary magazine.