Veronesi wins wildlife photography prize for elephant image

Italian wildlife photographer Federico Veronesi has won the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year top prize for The Aftermath, a photograph of a female elephant carrying a dead calf in Namibia. The winning image was selected from entries in the annual competition, whose other awards include 19 category winners and a youth prize. Veronesi took the photograph while tracking elephants in the Huab River Valley. He said he followed unusual drag marks in the sand of a dry riverbed and found the elephant with the calf’s leg wedged between her tusk and trunk. Veronesi initially thought the female was the calf’s mother. After he shared the photographs with an elephant research project working in the area, he said, researchers told him that relationship could not be confirmed. They recognized the elephant as a female that had lost a calf several years earlier and said she had previously picked up dead calves belonging to other females. The photograph is presented as a record of an observed animal encounter; the available information does not establish the female’s relationship to the calf.