Prix Pictet photography challenges and empowers people on the environment
Artistically outstanding and compelling narratives Prix Pictet photography
Showcase of Prix Pictet photography
The Prix Pictet photography exhibitions showcase exceptional talent by photographers with an extensive body of work while at the same time putting a human face to the issue of sustainability.
The organisation aims to harness the power of photography – all genres of photography – to draw global attention to issues of sustainability, especially those concerning the environment.
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Founded in 2008 by the Pictet Group, the Prix Pictet has become the world’s leading award for photography and sustainability.
Highlight on sustainability
There have been ten eighteen-month cycles of the award, each highlighting a particular facet of sustainability.
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The ten themes include Water, Earth, Growth, Power, Consumption, Disorder, Space, Hope, Fire and Human.
The exhibition features work from the winner and the eleven shortlisted photographers. Since 2008, the nine cycles of the Prix Pictet have been shown in exhibitions in many major cities of the world, with visitor numbers of over one million.
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The Prix Pictet is an award of HK$ 850,000 given to the photographer who, in the opinion of the independent jury, has produced a series of work that is both artistically outstanding and presents a compelling narrative related to the theme of the award.
Prix Pictet photography award
No preference is given to any particular kind of photographic material, technique or creative route, nor are any of these excluded from consideration.
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An artist using photographs, for example, is judged by precisely the same criteria as a photojournalist, a commercial photographer, or a professional in another field for whom photography may be no more than one of many tools.
Photographers nominated
In arriving at their final decision on the award, the judges make no distinction between photographs of different genres, nor do they assume different potential types of audience for any class of photograph.
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Photographers are nominated by a group of over 350 leading visual arts experts worldwide, including directors of major museums and galleries, journalists, and critics, who each propose photographers for consideration by an independent jury.
Gauri Gill Notes from the Desert
Each cycle of the Prix Pictet tours the world, bringing the work of the shortlisted photographers before a wide international audience.
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The winner of the Human cycle is Gauri Gill for her series Notes from the Desert.
Gill’s work emphasises her belief in working with and through community, in what she calls “active listening”. For more than two decades, she has been engaged with marginalised communities in the desert of western Rajasthan and, for the past decade, also with indigenous artists in Maharashtra.
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The works of the eleven shortlisted photographers were equally strong as the winner. Their broad range of subject matter also delves into the human aspects of sustainability and the environment.
Landscape remote regions
Ragnar Axelsson has been photographing the people, animals and landscape of the most remote regions of the Arctic, including Iceland, Siberia and Greenland for more than forty years.
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His work Where the World is Melting documents how the relationships of people with their extreme environments are being profoundly altered by climate change.
Alessandro Cinque Peru’s series A Toxic State explores environmental and socio-political issues in Latin America, particularly the devastating impact of mining on indigenous Quechua communities and their lands.
Federico Ríos Escobar is a widely published photojournalist whose work has covered armed conflict in Colombia, the environment and its relationship with society. Paths of Desperate Hope documents the migration crisis underway in South America.
After beginning her career as a graphic designer and art director, Gera Artemova switched to photography in 2008.
Her work was mainly documentary from 2011 to 2014 before she turned to conceptual and art projects after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. War Diary is her response to the events and to express her feelings.
Siân Davey’s background is in fine art and social policy; she worked as a humanist Buddhist psychotherapist for fifteen years.
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In 2007, she was inspired to translate her personal history into creative practice, including a childhood of poverty and neglect.
Expression of Joy
In 2011, she moved into photography. As her series The Garden evolved, it became an expression of joy, interconnectedness, yearning, sexuality, and defiance.
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Michal Luczak is a photographer, visual artist and curator working on the complex and exploitative relationship of humans with their immediate surroundings and the wider natural environment.
Extraction series is his record of the multilevel experience of living in the shadow of a mine and a visual representation of mining’s impact on landscape, architecture, the air, and humans.
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Vasantha Yogananthan, born to a French mother and a Sri Lankan father, is a self-taught photographer who started taking analogue images at the age of sixteen.
In the summer of 2022, he spent three months making Mystery Street, a body of work centred on the theme of childhood in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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The 300-year-old city’s past was partly wiped out by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, before this new generation of children were born. Like the children he photographed, it is a city whose future is greatly threatened by climate change.
Vanessa Winship is known for her portrait, landscape and reportage photography. Sweet Nothings: Schoolgirls from the Borderlands of Eastern Anatolia is a series of portraits of girls in the borderlands of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia, a region euphemistically called the “emergency area” because of a long, low-level guerrilla war.
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Yael Martínez’s work addresses fractured communities in Mexico, creating images that often reflect the sense of emptiness, absence, pain and suffering of those afflicted by the state and organised crime.
Bad transformed into good
To make the images in Luciérnaga (Firefly), he made prints, put pinpricks in the paper, then shone light through the holes and photographed them again.
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The pinpricks in the images are an analogy for trauma and how we as human beings can transform bad energy and a bad situation and turn them into something positive, changing darkness into light.
On graduating from New York University in 1990, Richard Renaldi worked as a researcher and editor at Magnum Photos and Impact Visuals. At this time, he started the first of many long-term projects, a series of street portraits on Madison Avenue.
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Each diptych in the series Disturbed Harmonies is an equivalent, every face an enigmatic globe whose geographies, histories, and political divisions challenge us to interrogate more fully their tectonic pressures.
Hoda Afshar works at the intersection of conceptual, staged and documentary image-making, exploring the representation of gender, marginality and displacement.
Her series Speak the Wind refers to a belief held by islanders of the Strait of Hormuz off the southern coast of Iran that the existence of winds — generally thought of as harmful — that may possess a person, causing her to experience illness or disease, and a corresponding ritual practice involving incense, music, and movement, in which a hereditary cult leader speaks with the wind through the afflicted patient in one of many local or foreign tongues in order to negotiate its departure.
Text Prix Pictet & Martin Wray / Photos courtesy of Prix Pictet
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