Welcome to the 3rd annual American Photo Images of the Year Competition. This year's contest topped all others in the number of entries, which came to us from around the globe. As you will see, the imagery we looked at is extraordinary. This photo contest differs from others in the breadth of the subject matter we call for -- from war photography to advertising work, from student work to nature imagery. Our contest also looks at work by pros and amateurs alike. This year, for the first time, all the entries were received, and judged, online. The editors of American Photo did the first two rounds of judging. The final round was judged by three distinguished names in photography: veteran photo editor Laurie Kratochvil, based in New York City; Boston-based photographer and educator Henry Horenstein; and David Fahey, director of the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles. Winners in the six categories will share $10,000 in prizes. A Grand Prize winner will be announced at a special event in New York in December and here at PopPhoto.com. Credits (clockwise from top left) Steven Meisel, Callie Shell, Chang Kyun Kim, Felix Hug, Walter Astrada, Mona Kuhn LAUNCH SLIDESHOW

© Steven Meisel

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Madonna has worked with a handful of photographers throughout her career to create a carefully calculated collection of iconography. Early on she collaborated with Herb Ritts, who polished her photographic image to a high sheen, establishing Madonna as a force in culture and fashion. Over the years, Bruce Weber, Mario Testino, and others helped her shape-shift her identity, always being careful to place her persona just outside the bounds of middle-class tastes but close enough so that her every move could be witnessed by her followers. Such is her genius. Her most notable -- and most interesting -- work has been done with Steven Meisel, who photographed her for the cover of her 1984 album, Like a Virgin, and for a series of projects in the early 1990s. The most infamous of those was the 1992 book, Sex, made at the moment when Madonna's persona was veering from neo-punk to neo-Marquis de Sade.

Reuniting for the cover of Vanity Fair's May 2008 Green Issue, the pair updated Madonna's cultural status once again, turning the 49-year-old soon-to-be single mother into a lingerie-clad warrior, guarding the globe through the sheer power of her sexuality. In Meisel's beautifully rendered pictures, the Material Girl becomes an Earth MILF, demonstrating again the power of imagery to create seductive fantasy. Environmentalism aside, the issue coincided with the release of Madonna's Hard Candy album, and readers were invited to explore the hardworking entertainer's personal high-wire act.

© Felix Hug

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Once a professional basketball player in Europe, Felix Hug liked taking pictures while on the road. In 2004 he decided he preferred making travel shots to jump shots, and he "turned pro." For a while, that meant photographing weddings. His big break came when he got a job shooting southern Asia for Silk Air, the regional branch of Singapore Airlines. One destination was Kuching, Borneo, where he made the photo that won this year's nature category.

The picture was taken late in the evening at Bako National Park, one of the few places where it is possible to see the endangered proboscis monkey in the wild. "With wildlife you need good preparation, time, and a longer lens than what I normally use," Hug says. After spending most of one day getting "average" shots of the shy creatures hiding in rain-forest trees, Hug and his production partner, Jamie Boyd, were calling it quits. Then Boyd noticed a few animals in a mangrove swamp. Bending low, Hug shot one of the monkeys with his Nikon D200 and Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8 lens. Exposure was 1/500 second at f/4.5 and ISO 200.

"Later on, I titled the image 'Ape Man Walking,'" Hug says. For information, go to eyesonAsia.net.

© Mona Kuhn

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Mona Kuhn just returned from the rain forests of her native Brazil, where she was gathering material for a book titled Native -- her third to be published by Steidl. Her home now is Los Angeles, where since 1998 she has been an independent studies scholar researching art history at the Getty Research Institute. Kuhn's work is shaped by her own life experiences, but always informed by what has come before. She made these images, for instance, in Venice, Italy, working with five models for a week in two palazzos along the Grand Canal. "I wanted to translate the overall feeling of being there into my own visual vocabulary," she says. In the image of the nude (opposite), her studies of how the Renaissance Masters dealt with shadows melded with the trust and mutual respect she shared with her models. The photo below resulted from her feeling of being above water at all times; she used an underwater camera and shot from a vintage boat. For more, visit monakuhn.com.

© Callie Shell

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Titled "A Moment to Savor," this scene was captured in June of 2008 by Time photographer Callie Shell as Barack Obama -- with his wife, Michelle, close aides, and advisers -- rode a freight elevator en route to making a victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota. If everyone looks pleased, it's because Obama had just secured enough delegates for the Democratic nomination for president. Shell had spent nearly two years shadowing Obama on the campaign trail. "He doesn't seem to mind me," she told The Digital Journalist. "If he does, he and his staff have hid it well."

Shell is a veteran of presidential politics, having traveled with the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign and later serving as Al Gore's official vice presidential photographer for eight years. She first met Obama in 2004 while she was covering the John Kerry campaign for Time. Shell recalls sending more pictures to her editor of this young Illinois state senator than she did of Kerry, the Democratic nominee. "I just have a feeling about him," she said of Obama at the time. "I think he will be important down the road."

Shell says her years working with Gore "in the bubble" of the White House photographic press corps instilled valuable lessons of patience. "It taught me to stand quietly for hours, to let things evolve, let people forget about you," she says. "The moment will happen. You just have to wait."

© Chang Kyun Kim

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While working as a marketing manager in South Korea, Chang Kyun Kim spent a lot of face time with design agencies. In the process, Kim became so enamored of commercial photography that he switched careers and enrolled in California's Brooks Institute of Photography. A year later, he transferred to the MFA program in photography at New York City's Parsons School of Design, where he is now studying to become not a commercial photographer but a "great architectural photographer." His adopted home has given him inspiration in the form of skyscrapers.

"My works about architecture start from my thought that buildings and space have a soul; they express emotions just like human beings," says Kim, who calls this series of images Their Dialogues. "I realized the buildings were actually talking to each other," he adds, "laughing, screaming and sometimes arguing. I decided to capture the amazing moments with my 4x5 view camera."

You can see more of Mr. Kim's portfolio, titled Architecture, Light and the Metaphor, at changkimphotography.com.

© Walter Astrada

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On New Year's Day, 2008, dozens of people were burned alive in a Kenyan church during ongoing riots in response to President Mwai Kibaki's suspicious reelection the month before. For Argentinean photojournalist Walter Astrada the violence was a call to action. He decided he had to show the world what was happening.

Astrada spent nearly two months taking pictures of the postelection violence that has already claimed 1,000 lives and has displaced more than 300,000 people. On January 17 -- after two days of mass public demonstrations -- a group of policemen raided Kibera, an enormous slum in Nairobi, throwing tear gas into homes and brutalizing suspected supporters of Kibaki's opponent, Raila Odinga. Astrada followed the police, and from amid the chaos, he heard a boy shouting, "Baba," or Father; an officer had kicked the terrified boy's door down while he was home alone.

Astrada chose to focus on the officer's instrument of violence, instead of his whole person, to emphasize the cruelty of the raid. "In this case, the policeman used a baton, but it could have been a machete, or any weapon to hurt or kill," Astrada explains. "That was happening all along Kenya."

Two days later, Astrada visited the boy to see if he was okay. The boy hadn't been physically harmed, but Astrada discovered why he'd been home alone: He'd been visiting his grandmother's house while she'd been at work; this was his vacation.