There is, in underwater life, a captivating otherness, and these images from the Underwater Photographer of the Year competition bring it forth with admirable clarity.

The first photograph captures a clownfish parent keeping vigil over the moment when the eggs it had tended so carefully begin to hatch. A scene which, according to the judges, they had never encountered before. They also praised what they called the “babies’ perspective,” from which the clownfish appears magnified, assuming a scale far greater than its actual size. The image, taken by Kazushige Horiguchi off the southernmost tip of Japan, in Kagoshima Prefecture, won first place in the Behavior category.

Proceeding clockwise, third place in the same category went to an image of a California newt, photographed in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its force lies in the ambiguity it produces: the female appears to be guarding her eggs, when in fact she is clutching another female’s as she prepares to lay her own. Anton Sorokin, the photographer, wrote in the text accompanying his submission: “Her holding onto the eggs this way was a happy coincidence, but it made for a truly exciting photographic opportunity.”

With its mouth flung fully open and its fins spread to their widest reach, the dazzling snaketooth fish in the third image seems ready to strike. Steven Kovacs, however, believes it was merely yawning. I cannot imagine what would lead him to such a conclusion. That is where I stop following him. What is beyond dispute is that the photograph—awarded second place in the Portrait category—was indeed taken during a night dive off the coast of Florida. Kovacs observes that “these fish are difficult to photograph, because they have the irritating habit of hanging upside down in the water column, looking straight toward the bottom. One night I had the enormous good fortune to come across this beautiful individual, with its fins fully extended.”

This kind of photography leaves me somewhat perplexed. It is difficult to regard it as art. And yet it records fascinating natural phenomena and creatures belonging to that other world we call the ocean, inaccessible to our gaze by any other means.

Every day, on social media, I see dozens of photographs of beautiful women. Do not the many creatures shaped over more than five hundred million years of evolution possess a beauty of their own as well? Be certain of this: they will still be there when no trace of the human race remains.

On the competition

The Underwater Photographer of the Year (UPY United Kingdom) is one of the most prestigious international competitions devoted to underwater photography. Currently organized by Dan Bolt and Alex Mustard, it recognizes images that stand out not only for their technical excellence, but also for their capacity to reveal the strangeness, beauty, and complexity of the underwater world. According to the organizers, the competition includes multiple principal categories—among them Behavior, Portrait, Macro, Wide Angle, and Wrecks—as well as special awards such as the one for marine conservation, along with several sections reserved for images taken in British waters.

The 2026 edition has already announced its winners, with the top prize going to Matty Smith, and the competition once again reaffirmed both its global reach and its curatorial rigor. One of the features the organizers themselves identify as distinctive is the judging process: all images are reviewed several times by the jury, without any preliminary elimination round. The competition also claims a long history dating back to 1965, a lineage that reinforces its historical standing within contemporary underwater photography.