When you picture an environmental photo winner, you imagine something epic. Crashing waves, a lone polar bear on shrinking ice, perhaps a heartbreaking aerial shot of deforestation. Britta Jaschinski's image is none of those things.
Handprint on Sea Turtle looks, at first glance, like a digital artwork or a still from a sci-fi film: a green sea turtle rendered in deep purples and blues, surrounded by neon-green constellations of light. Look closer, and you'll spot a human handprint glowing on its shell. That's not post-processing. It's forensic science, photographed under ultraviolet light.
The image was taken at the ZSL Wildlife Forensic Lab in London, where scientists Alexandra Thomas and Louise Gibson are developing methods to lift evidence from seized wildlife and the criminals who handle it.
Article continues belowHow it was made
Special fluorescent powder dyes, invisible in normal light, reveal fingerprints, blood, bodily fluids and gunpowder residues when illuminated with ultraviolet light. Jaschinski, a UK- and Germany-based photojournalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Time and GEO, embedded herself with the team to document their work. The result is a photograph that functions simultaneously as science communication, legal advocacy and art.
It's also, as of today, the Grand Prize winner of the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation's 2026 Environmental Photography Award. Now in its sixth year, this contest shortlisted 36 images across five categories: Changemakers, Forests, Humanity vs Nature, Ocean and Polar Regions. Jaschinski's image won the Changemakers category and was then elevated to the Grand Prize by the international jury, earning a €5,000 (approx. $5,800 / £4,300) grant.
It's quite a story when you think about it. In a field crowded with typical nature photography, the judges chose a picture taken in a lab, lit by ultraviolet, of a captive animal. The lesson: context matters as much as craft.
An inspirational shortlist
The other category winners offer a different kind of masterclass. Arnaud Farré took the Forests prize for Spirits of the Falls, a stunning frame of Iguazu Falls at dawn with a toco toucan silhouetted in the foreground. Fernando Faciole's Born for the Ocean, Fated to the Flames, the Humanity vs Nature winner, documents the incineration of 28.7 tonnes of seized shark fins in São Paulo. And Vadim Makhorov's The Gathering, a vertiginous top-down view of hundreds of Pacific walruses packed onto a Russian shoreline, won the Polar Regions category.
Henley Spiers, meanwhile, claimed the Ocean prize for Shearwater's Dilemma, an underwater shot of a wedge-tailed shearwater plunging into a football-pitch-sized school of lanternfish off Costa Rica. And the Public Award went to Doug Gimesy for Koalas are Dying for You to Slow Down, a brutally direct roadside image of a koala struck by a car in Australia.
The runner-up selections are equally strong. In the Changemakers category, Maud Delaflotte's Insects, Architects of a Sustainable Future shows a researcher standing in a white protective suit inside an aviary absolutely swarming with black soldier flies, a species increasingly farmed as a sustainable protein source; the image is equal parts fascinating and unsettling, which is rather the point.
In the Humanity vs Nature runner-up slots, Alain Schroeder's Sinking Hopes is perhaps the most quietly devastating image in the whole selection: two young children peer out from a window in flood-submerged Java, one pressing her hand flat against the glass, her feet dangling above the brown water outside.
Peter McGee's Conservation vs Tourism, shot from below at a whale shark dive site in the Philippines, raises an equally uncomfortable question, the sharks circled by so many swimmers and boats that conservation and exploitation start to look uncomfortably similar from this angle.
Elsewhere in the runner-up selection, Luca Eberle's portrait of a female puma in Costa Rica and Hira Punjabi's action shot of a rose-ringed parakeet biting the tail of a monitor lizard in India bring the Forests category a jolt of wildlife energy.
Shane Gross's Better than Gold is a textbook example of the over-under split-level shot: a school of bigeye trevally gleaming below the surface off the Seychelles, a stormy sunset and a faint rainbow filling the sky above.
The Polar Regions runner-ups go to opposite extremes: Panos Laskarakis's The Explorers hides a polar bear and her cub as near-invisible white specks against an enormous snow-covered Norwegian mountainside, while Lucas Bustamante's Penguin Feast offers two brown skuas on Antarctic snow, perfectly symmetrical, each gripping an end of a penguin chick in a frame so graphically composed it could be a logo.
The full selection of 36 shortlisted images go on show at the Promenade du Larvotto in Monaco from 28 May to 30 July 2026, before touring internationally. A book published by Skira Paris accompanies the exhibition. If you're in the region, it's worth the trip: the quality of this year's shortlist is exceptional, and seeing Jaschinski's UV image at scale will, one suspects, be rather extraordinary.
The 2027 competition opens for entries on 1 September 2026 at fpa2photoaward.org.
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