From praying monks and diving swimmers to meteor showers and the tomb of Pope Francis, these are 12 of the most eye-catching and memorable images of the year so far.

Warning: This article contains imagery that some may find distressing.

A photo of monks praying beneath the vast golden dome of Wat Phra Dhammakaya during the yearly ceremony of Makha Bucha in February is breathtaking in its ethereal glow. Tens of thousands of monks and devotees, many holding lanterns, assemble to commemorate the Buddha's first great teaching. Its unreal radiance calls to mind the contours of a 19th-Century Burmese manuscript depicting the Buddha's first sermon at the Deer Park, where monks and animals cluster around his resplendent form. Both images capture the devotion of communities determined to honour and be transformed.

Photos of a giant, confetti-exploding papier-mâché rat, drifting down the Grand Canal in the water parade that traditionally opens the Venice Carnival in February, captured the scene in a shatter of vibrating colour. Rodent-turned-spectacle, the floating "Pantegana" emerges imaginatively from the city's drains as an emblem of Venice's comic underbelly. Disgorging bursts of colour, the rat offers a grotesquely glittery foil to the elegantly luminous shroud that veils Venice in countless paintings, such as neo-Impressionist Paul Signac's Entrance to the Grand Canal, 1905. In both images, Venice dissolves into a mosaic of pixelated light.

A photo taken in April of the tomb of Pope Francis in Rome – the first interment of a pontiff outside the Vatican in over a century – on which was laid a single white rose, was exquisitely haunting. The stark stone slab seems to shudder in fusty crypt light. The photo's transcription of the eloquent gloom echoes the evocative mood of a 1798 drawing by JMW Turner of Cardinal Morton's tomb in Canterbury Cathedral. Turner's graphite-on-paper drawing feels lit by an ever-deepening inner radiance, which our eyes peel their way towards, one petal at a time. Both images see stone, like death, as permeable, inconclusive.

There is something inescapably archetypal about the photo taken in April of a migrant worker pausing to drink water while harvesting wheat on the outskirts of Chandigarh, India. The worker's raised cup and sickle, glinting against the golden glow of grain, evoke the emblematic figure of the lone harvester in Winslow Homer's The Veteran in a New Field, 1865. In Homer's work, a Union veteran wields a scythe against a sea of wheat in a fable of national reckoning after the US Civil War. Both images locate their subjects between allegory and labour, harvesting not only grain but the enduring promise of renewal.

The image of a young woman reaching up to touch the slowly unclenching index finger of an enormous robot hand was captured during a press tour of........

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