Inside the Shot That Won the World's Toughest Adventure Photography Contest
To make it to Öræfi, Iceland with a camera, a subject, and the nerve to use both, you first have to get there. The remote glacial region in southeast Iceland — a landscape shaped by one of the most volcanically active ice caps on Earth — does not make things easy. Roads wash out. Weather shuts in without warning. The terrain itself is a negotiation between crampons and ancient ice, between ambition and the mountain's indifference. It was precisely there, in that punishing place, that Austrian photographer Tom Klocker produced what the Illume Awards 2026 judges determined to be the most powerful climbing photograph on the planet this year.
Klocker has won the Climb Category at The Illume Awards 2026 — described as the world's most recognized adventure and action sports photography contest — with his photograph of climber Mario Andexlinger in Iceland, selected as the winning image from 20 Climb Category Finalists. The win announced Klocker not merely as a skilled technician with a camera, but as someone willing to physically put himself where the sport demands — on the ice, in the cold, in the kind of light that most photographers never see because they never make the trip.
What Is the Illume Awards, and Why Does Winning Matter?
The Illume Awards is the new, independent continuation of what was Red Bull Illume — a long-running, high-profile competition focused on adventure and action sports photography. For outdoor and action sports photographers, that lineage carries real weight. Since 2006, the contest has received more than 210,498 submissions from over 30,489 photographers across 122 countries, reaching an audience of more than 500 million. Those are not vanity metrics. They reflect the global hunger for images that document what happens when humans push themselves against wild environments.
The 2026 edition is the first under the new branding, with an expanded environmental focus and partnerships with Leave No Trace and World Bicycle Relief. That pivot signals something larger than a logo change — it reflects where the outdoor industry is heading, toward a conversation about access, stewardship, and what is at stake in the landscapes these athletes are documenting. Moving forward under a new identity and a sharpened purpose, the award marks a strategic shift from its roots. While continuing to honour the unparalleled grit of action sports photographers, it introduces a vital new mandate: inspiring the global community to protect the wild places captured on camera.
A Contest Rebuilt for the Modern Era
There are sixteen categories total: eight sports — Adventure, Aerial, Bike, Climb, Skate, Snow, Surf, Trail — and eight themes — Close-Up, Emerging, Innovation, Lifestyle, Masterpiece, Playground, RAW, Spirit. The sports-specific breakdown is significant. Where earlier editions of the contest grouped disparate disciplines together, the current structure gives each sport its own judging panel, its own pool of finalists, and its own winner — meaning that a climbing photograph is evaluated by people who actually understand the difference between a desperate mixed route and a tourist scramble.
Each photo is first judged within its sport by a panel of five dedicated experts per category. From there, finalists move into a second stage of judging, where an additional 20 experts from the photography and media industries join the process. In total, 60 industry experts review the photos to select the world's best adventure and action sports photos. The blind judging component also matters enormously. The shots are chosen blind via an online system that shows only the image, without any information about the photographer to ensure a fair process. Reputation cannot carry a mediocre frame. The photograph has to stand on its own.
The Photograph: Ice, Atmosphere, and an Ice Cave Disappearing in Real Time
The photo captures a challenging ice climbing ascent in Iceland, combining technical climbing with a distinctive atmosphere and color palette. But reduce it to those terms and you strip out everything that makes it remarkable. The location — Öræfi — sits beneath Öræfajökull, one of Iceland's largest and most imposing stratovolcanoes, a place where the ice is neither decorative nor stable. This is functional, active glacier terrain where the features that make for compelling photographs are also the features that can collapse, flood, or disappear entirely within a single season.
That context is precisely what Klocker emphasized when describing the experience of making the image. The ice cave was once over 100 meters long. By the time they were there, it was only about 20 meters long, and you could still walk across the top — with crampons, of course. The shot was very challenging, and you had to have extremely good ice climbing experience. The subtext there is striking: this is not a photograph of a timeless landscape. It is a photograph of something vanishing. The cave itself has shrunk by roughly 80 percent, a casualty of the same glacial retreat that makes places like Öræfi simultaneously more accessible and more precarious than they have ever been. Klocker and Andexlinger did not find a permanent monument. They found the last act of one.
The Drone Perspective That Changed the Frame
One of the most revealing details in Klocker's account of the shoot involves a spontaneous decision made possible by aerial technology. The icebergs looked so incredibly cool from the drone's perspective that he had to send Mario out right away because he didn't expect to be able to get that shot. That instinct — deploy the athlete, capture the moment before conditions change — is the hallmark of a photographer who has spent years working in environments where light, weather, and subject alignment collapse into a narrow window and then disappear. In adventure sports photography, hesitation is a deleted frame.
The mood of the image was not manufactured. It was a product of the place on that specific day. As Klocker put it, "This shot was very challenging, and you had to have extremely good ice climbing experience. The mystical atmosphere that day went perfectly with the colors." What he is describing is the intersection of preparation and luck that every serious outdoor photographer chases — the technical ability to be ready when conditions align, and the physical capability to be in the right place when they do.
Who Is Tom Klocker?
Klocker's background explains a great deal about how he ended up in a glacier cave in Iceland with a drone, a world-class ice climber, and a camera. A professional freelance photographer based in Tyrol, Austria, his career as a professional freestyle snowboarder started in 2008, and he competed at the biggest competitions around the globe, working with the best movie productions in the industry. That foundation matters. An athlete who becomes a photographer carries institutional knowledge that no classroom can teach — how bodies move under physical stress, how light behaves differently on snow and ice, where to be when the action reaches its peak, and crucially, when to get out of the way.
He always had a big passion for taking photos, and while traveling around the world he got more and more into photography. He climbed mountains back home to get unique photos and to learn more. After around ten years of professional snowboarding, it was time to make the next step — he set his focus on photography one hundred percent and started his own business as a freelance photographer. That transition from competitor to documentarian is one that a growing number of adventure athletes are making, and Klocker's trajectory — from the halfpipe to the ice cave — represents its most compelling version. He did not pick up a camera and point it at the sport from the parking lot. He got on the mountain first.
The Role of Mario Andexlinger
A photograph of a climber is only as good as the climber, and Klocker's choice of Mario Andexlinger as his subject was not accidental. Ice climbing at Öræfi demands a specific skill set: the ability to front-point on steep glacial ice, manage protection in a medium that can fracture unpredictably, read the stability of ice features in real time, and do all of it while a photographer is positioned nearby, managing both a drone and a ground-level camera rig. The fact that Andexlinger could execute technically demanding movement in a visually cohesive way — giving Klocker the angles he needed — is as much a part of the photograph's success as the light or the composition. In adventure sports photography, athlete and photographer are a team, and this one clearly functioned well under pressure.
The Judging Panel: What They Were Looking For
The winning photograph was selected by The Illume's expert Judging Panel, which brings together photographers, climbers and industry voices with deep knowledge of the sport and photography — including renowned photographer Krystle Wright, outdoor photographer and climber Lena Drapella, Gripped photo editor Matt Stetson, and athletes Will Gadd and Stefan Glowacz. That panel is not assembled casually. Will Gadd is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished ice and mixed climbers in history, a man who has put up routes on frozen waterfalls around the world and who understands, from lived experience, the difference between a photograph that captures the reality of hard ice climbing and one that flatters it. Stefan Glowacz is a German rock and big-wall legend. Krystle Wright is an adventure photographer who has herself shot in some of the world's most dangerous locations. When this group agrees on a winner, the consensus means something.
What they recognized in Klocker's image was the convergence of the technical and the atmospheric — two things that rarely arrive simultaneously in ice climbing photography. Technically demanding climbing is often ugly from a visual standpoint: the climber is small, the ice is gray, and the exposure is flat. What Klocker captured was the opposite — a scene in which the difficulty of the climbing and the otherworldliness of the environment reinforced each other. The shot earned its mystique.
The Announcement: Tokyo, Ikebukuro, and a Global Field of Finalists
The Climb Category Winner was announced in Tokyo, Japan, hosted by ISHII SPORTS and Yodobashi. The winner was revealed physically by the photographer Jason Halayko at the ISHII SPORTS store in Ikebukuro, while Austrian climber and Olympian Jessy Pilz was also part of the announcement. That an Icelandic-set, Austrian-made ice climbing photograph was revealed to the world in a gear store in one of Tokyo's busiest commercial districts is its own kind of statement about the global reach of the outdoor sports photography community. Adventure photography does not belong to any single country or continent. The audience is everywhere.
All 20 Category Finalists joined the announcement live via an online call, connecting them with the event in Tokyo. For the 19 photographers who came close but did not take the title, that moment crystallized both the competition's reach and its stakes. Twenty photographers from across the world, dialed into a screen in Japan, watching one frame get elevated above the rest. In a discipline where the work is often solitary — hours of waiting, cold, technical frustration, physical exposure — the communal experience of a shared reveal carries its own kind of gravity.
What the Winner Takes Home
As Climb Category Winner, Klocker receives a prize package that brings together photography equipment, climbing gear, and recognition from The Illume's partners. The prize includes a Leica D-Lux 8, a complete Angelbird storage package, Blackbird and Furia Air footwear from SCARPA, and a COOPH camera strap. The specificity of that prize list tells you something about who sponsors this contest and, by extension, who the intended audience is. Leica and Angelbird cater to professionals who take their image quality and data integrity seriously in the field. SCARPA's Furia Air is a technical performance shoe designed for friction and precision on demanding terrain — it is not gear for the casual hiker. The Illume is not courting weekend photographers. It is speaking directly to people who are out in the mountains doing the actual work.
His winning photograph will also be published in The Illume Photobook 2026. Physical publication in a curated photobook carries a different kind of permanence than a social media post or a web feature. It is a document — something that will sit on the shelves of photographers, athletes, and outdoor enthusiasts and be returned to over time. For an image already carrying the visual weight of a disappearing ice cave, that permanence has an additional resonance.
The Wider Field: Other Finalists and the 2026 Contest's Scope
Klocker's image did not win in a vacuum. The 20 Climb Category Finalists represent the breadth of where technical climbing photography is being taken right now — across multiple continents, disciplines, and conditions. Among the other finalist images, one featured climber Fred Moix on a marble quarry wall in Varzo, Italy. The photographer was standing on the opposite side of the quarry at a considerable distance, while Moix was climbing high on the enormous marble wall. The crack Fred is climbing is completely unnatural — it is an open drilling hole. He had originally equipped the line with bolts and climbed it that way together with Marco Rochat in 2024. Another finalist documented climber Graham McGrath on Unicorn, a grade VIII, 8 winter route at Stob Coire nan Lochan in Scotland — a 75-meter corner in the Scottish Highlands that represents the kind of committing traditional climbing that rarely reaches international photography audiences. A third finalist captured Dani Arnold, one of the fastest alpinists in the world, during an expedition to Scoresbysund in Greenland. The breadth alone — Iceland, Italy, Scotland, Greenland — speaks to where the community is operating.
The Bike Category winner, announced around the same time, reinforced the contest's commitment to images that require genuine personal risk and logistical investment to produce. American photographer Lear Miller won the Bike Category for an atmospheric image of rider Hannah Bergemann captured during Chris Benchetler's Mountains of the Moon project in Pacific City, Oregon. The image was made during four overnight sessions in challenging rain, with the team filming and photographing from around 10pm until 4am. Four nights in the rain for a single frame. That is the standard the Illume is setting, and it is a high one.
What It Takes to Shoot at This Level: Gear, Skill, and Risk
Adventure sports photography at the level demanded by the Illume is not a genre for the unprepared. At Öræfi, the baseline requirements before you even touch a camera include: competency in glacier travel, crampon technique, and self-arrest; the ability to assess crevasse risk in low-visibility conditions; experience managing a drone in high-wind alpine environments; and enough physical fitness to carry both camera gear and safety equipment over potentially unstable ice. Klocker's background as a competitive freestyle snowboarder gave him a foundation in all of the above — an understanding of cold-weather gear management, terrain assessment, and the physical demands of operating at altitude in winter conditions.
On the photography side, capturing ice in a way that renders both its texture and its color requires precise exposure management. Glacial ice absorbs and reflects light in ways that can easily fool a camera's metering system, pushing exposures toward blown highlights or muddy shadows. The fact that Klocker was also managing a drone — capturing aerial angles on icebergs while simultaneously working his ground-level shot — adds another layer of operational complexity. Real-time drone piloting in a location with variable winds, over a subject who is actively climbing technical terrain, is not a casual affair. It demands the kind of practiced automation that comes from years in the field.
Why Adventure Photography Still Matters in 2026
There is an argument, made with increasing regularity, that in an era of ubiquitous cameras and algorithmic image feeds, adventure photography has become commoditized — that the sheer volume of content has eroded what any single image can mean. Klocker's win pushes back against that thesis. An ice cave that has shrunk from 100 meters to 20, photographed by a man who descended on a makeshift anchor over loose and sharp glacial blocks, with an ice climber working technical terrain overhead — that image could not be produced by a hobbyist with a smartphone. It required physical commitment, technical expertise, environmental knowledge, and the willingness to accept real risk in pursuit of a specific frame.
The Illume Awards function as a global platform built to celebrate the photographers behind the lens — those who go to extraordinary lengths to capture human-powered adventure and action sports. That language — extraordinary lengths — is not marketing copy. It is a literal description of what the best work in this field demands. Klocker went to Iceland, found a glacier feature in the late stages of its existence, built a technical climbing scenario around it, managed aerial and ground-level perspectives simultaneously, and walked away with an image that a room full of elite climbers and photographers unanimously elevated above nearly everything else submitted this year. The lengths were extraordinary. So was the result.
As the Illume Awards continue to announce category winners for Snow, Surf, Trail, and the remaining sports disciplines through the fall of 2026, the standard set by Klocker's Iceland image will hang over the rest of the reveal. The climbing world produced something singular. Whether the other disciplines can match it remains to be seen — but if the quality of the finalist pools across the board is any indication, the 2026 Illume Photobook is going to be worth tracking down.
