Chilean photographer Alfredo Jaar has received the 2025 Prix Pixtet for his poignant portfolio of pictures on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, USA. It is the eleventh time that the award has been given, with the New York City-based photographer successful a 100,000 Swiss Francs (US$126,000) as his prize.
Jaar’s portfolio was chosen by a jury from a shortlist of twelve photographers for his 2025 sequence The End.
‘My objective in this series is to show the tragic fate of the lake and simultaneously reveal its extraordinary beauty and potential,” says Jaar. ‘In spite of the dire situation we are in, I wanted to create images of great beauty and sadness. In the face of the magnitude of this tragedy, I decided to print these images in a small, unspectacular format, as a kind of visual whisper, a lament for our dying planet.’
The lake has been described by scientists as an ‘environmental nuclear bomb’, with its ecosystem being destroyed by excessive water extraction. It has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area since the mid-nineteenth century, exposing toxic dust and driving salinity to dangerous levels.
“What used to be a thriving mecca for shore birds is now littered with the dried corpses of thousands of birds on the cracked mud flats that used to be the lake, Jaar explains.”
An exhibition featuring the work of all 12 shortlisted photographers shortlisted for the award is on show at The Pictet Gallery at the V&A Museum, London, until October 19 2025.