And the winner is … Kyrgyzstan! This is the main winner of our photo competition, whose theme ‘Frame the Joy’ proved to be a real challenge for the participants. It was to Kyrgyzstan that the lenses turned en masse to capture those moments of joy that emerge from everyday life.

Joy is that ‘vivid emotion, often accompanied by a sense of fulfilment, experienced by the individual when his or her desires and needs are satisfied’, as one definition puts it. A singular emotion, then, but one that the photographer’s talent can capture and make universal.

This is how the Novastan team chose the winning photo of the 2024 competition:

Tim Fedke captures the joy on the faces of little girls playing a mock game of kok-boru, an eminently masculine game emblematic of Central Asia. The viewer, initially seduced by the intensity of this joy, becomes pensive. How much of this joy is due to the pure pleasure of the game? How much, probably unconsciously, is due to the transgressive pleasure of penetrating the closed world of male power? An image that also echoes some very topical issues.

A special ‘Audience Award’ goes to Tommaso Aguzzi, who delighted our readers with some magnificent photos that offer a calmer, contemplative, almost melancholy vision of joy.

Special Jury Prize for the competition’s outsider, Gulyora Tolipova, who won us over by capturing a fleeting flash of sensual joy between a model getting ready for the photo and a little boy giving in to temptation, the third character in the story being the large strip of silky, shiny fabric that flows between them.

Thank you to all the participants who helped make this 2024 edition of the Novastan photo competition such a great success.

Find all of our photos of the day.