This Eerie Moment Captured at Snowbound Yellowstone Just Won the Independent Photographer Awards

Despite sitting on a cauldron of volcanoes in unrest, Yellowstone National Park dramatically transforms into a Disney-style frozen fantasy once the wintertime arrives. The looming coppices of pines, aspens, and cottonwoods pillowing the twisty roads of Yellowstone turn into Christmas trees, mottled with glittering flakes of snow. On boardwalks, the crispy leaves abandoned by autumn become entombed beneath slippery blankets of ice, constantly caressed by the coils of boiling steam exhaled by the bubbling hot spring waters. Valleys and meadows dress up in blankets of sparkling white ice, turning an ordinary landscape into a snowy fairytale where wild characters like wolves, elk, and bison struggle to roam and eat.

In the winter of 2025, just ahead of Christmas, photographer Shannon Culpepper got lucky as she spotted an innocent bison mom struggling to trundle through a snowstorm while her calves followed her. “One of my favorite Christmas memories,” she exclaimed in a video on Instagram. She was visiting Yellowstone with her kids when she hired snow coaches to gallop around the Lamar Valley to explore the icy wonderland and capture some of its dramas on her beloved camera. The lorry lurched from among the little hardy grasses sticking out from the snowfields and shivering bison prancing atop them. Amidst all this, she focused her camera on this bison, which seemed to be struggling in the snow. The photograph, titled “Stoic,” ended up winning the Independent Photographer Award 2026 in the Black & White category.

On Instagram, Culpepper confessed that she has taken dozens of wildlife shots over the years, in all sorts of different styles, but this shot was the hardest of all and also the most rewarding. Jason M. Peterson, the renowned monochrome master and the competition judge for this year, remarked, "The winter scene is simple and graphic, with a scale that goes beyond the size of the image. Single tree, single buffalo.”

As the name suggests, the winning photograph captures this bison trudging forward in a snowy valley, its thick fur powdered with snow. Just outside the frame, Culpepper shared, were two of her calves, walking behind her. The shot was taken in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley during a snowstorm. Except for the bison and a cluster of trees appearing faint and misty in the background, the photograph is white, expressing the imperturbable resilience and embracing motherhood of the stoic animal.

The second prize was bagged by Lou Fischer. His photograph, titled “Winding Road, Door County, Wisconsin, USA,” records the infamous S-shaped curve of a road near Highway 42, Gills Rock, that leads to Washington Island. An upper elevated section of the road, cushioned by groves of trees and clumps of bushes, tumbles, spills, and spreads into the photograph, unfurling the zigzagging spectacle. The white lane markings form a meandering pattern, looking as if someone squeezed out the entire tube of white paint on a grey charcoal-colored palette. "Amazing angle and depth,” Peterson commented.

Sanghamitra Sarkar secured the third position in the list with a photograph called “Eyes of the Sea – A Bajao Child’s World, Southeast Asia.” The photograph captured a moment from a Bajao village, catching the whimsical expression of a Bajao kid as he emerged from the waters, wearing what appear to be goggles. In the background appears a cluster of houses and a group of tribesmen tooling in the rippling sea in a stilt boat, often called “lepa-lepa.”

Editors at The Independent noted that by stripping away color from this shot, Sarkar invokes a “sense of profound timelessness.” Not just Sarkar, but each photographer on the list, demonstrating how even black-and-white hides a quiet drama of color in the background, and only those who have the eyes for it can see it and can feel it.

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