Prix Pictet 2025: Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar wins prized pictures and sustainability award

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Alfredo Jaar’s eerie picture of the Great Salt Lake in Utah has gained this 12 months’s Prix Pictet, one of many world’s main awards for pictures and sustainability.

The Chilean artist’s sequence, entitled The End illustrates how the realm is being destroyed by extreme water extraction and has change into what scientists have described as an ‘environmental nuclear bomb’.

Commenting on his work, Jaar mentioned: ‘My objective in this series is to show the tragic fate of the lake and simultaneously reveal its extraordinary beauty and potential. 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 Great Salt Lake in Utah, as soon as a keystone ecosystem within the western hemisphere, has now misplaced 73% of its water and 60% of its floor space because the mid-nineteenth century, exposing poisonous mud and driving salinity to harmful ranges.

The lake sustains $2.5 billion in direct financial exercise yearly, helps 80% of the state’s wetlands, and offers a significant habitat for ten million migratory birds. Its collapse can be a tragedy of incalculable magnitude and a transparent warning of issues to come back.

Sir David King, Founder and Chair of the Prix Pictet jury, mentioned: ‘The financial, social and political impacts of the present local weather disaster are immense. The variety of approaches with which the twelve shortlisted artists have interpreted the theme was extraordinary and the exhibition they’ve introduced on the Victoria and Albert Museum is actually outstanding.. Any one of many 12 shortlisted artists may simply have gained.”

Jaar, whose sequence was chosen in response to this 12 months’s theme, Storm, receives €107,000 because the winner of the eleventh cycle of the prize. The work of of all of the shortlisted candidates are proven beneath.

The Storm – Balazs Gardi

Gardi’s sequence charts the post-election assault on the US Capitol Building on 6 January 2021. As a younger photographer in his native Hungary, Gardi witnessed how propaganda remodeled a lately liberated Soviet consumer state right into a kleptocracy. The Storm seeks to warn how how simply a privileged society may slide into an Orwellian dystopia.

Hands Tell Stories – Belal Khaled

Belal Khaled’s Hands Tell Stories started whereas he lived in a tent outdoors the morgue at Nasser Hospital in Gaza after his home was destroyed. The sequence paperwork palms that via their scars, their stillness, their grip on life, inform tales no voice may carry.

Seasonal Sky – Baudouin Mouanda

Baudouin Mouanda’s reconstructed pictures are primarily based on actual occasions throughout floods in Brazzaville, Congo, throughout the 2020 COVID lockdown. They are supposed to function a reminder of the necessity to respect the atmosphere or face reprisals from nature.

The Lovely Monster over the Farm – Camille Seaman

Twister chasing Seaman went after a sort of thunderstorm known as a supercell, which may produce grapefruit-sized hail and spectacular tornadoes. Their clouds might be as much as 80km broad and 20km excessive, blocking out the daylight, making a darkish, ominous house beneath.

Hurricane Season – Hannah Modigh

Hurricane Season is a metaphor for residing on the verge of eruption, for a way that uncertainty, concern and anger bubble beneath the calm floor. Initially, Modigh was considering Louisiana due to its violent historical past and needed to analyze if this flows down the generations. She got here to grasp that concern of hurricanes and the widespread undertone of aggression got here from the identical supply, they had been pure reactions to emotions of risk.

Keep Dancing to the Beat of Your Heart – Laetitia Vançon

Vançon got down to painting Odesa on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast, a metropolis each strategic and symbolic significance. Her photographs work turned a portrait of the individuals who stayed and resist within the face of conflict. Even within the coronary heart of the storm, hope, tenderness, solidarity and spirit endure.

Are They Rocks or Clouds – Marina Canevea

Photography often captures the aftermath of an occasion. This challenge as an alternative is an try and foresee a future disaster, a repeat of the floods and landslides that devastated the Dolomites in northern Italy in 1966.

High Water in Venice – Patrizia Zelano

On 13 November 2019, Venice was submerged by one of many highest tides ever recorded. For Zelano saving books turned the core of her exploration into nature’s evocative energy and data. Each {photograph} urges us to rethink our relationship with the Earth, tradition and fragility.

Amazograma #1 – Roberto Huarcaya

A storm discharges accrued power, not as mere destruction, however as a power searching for to revive stability. Roberto Huarcaya’s picture captures that essence: a 30m-long body of an Amazonian palm mendacity on the mattress of the Madre de Dios River.

A Maquette for a Multiple Moment for the Hiroshima Peace Movement – Takashi Arai

The hypocentre, the purpose instantly beneath or above a nuclear explosion, is a metaphor for invisibility and unreachability. Takashi Arai’s sequence explores atomic monuments as if navigating the hypocentre’s gravitational pull, taking a whole bunch of 6cm x6 cm daguerreotypes, an early type of pictures.

Lucifier’s Vortex – Tom Fecht

Luciferines are cold-water plankton endangered by rising ocean temperatures. Their electrical results happen when thousands and thousands are uncovered to oxygen whereas reproducing on the turbulent floor of the ocean. Almost invisible to the bare eye, their elegant traces can solely be captured ‘entre chien et loup‘, a magical twilight second when the primary blue rays of daylight intersect with the remaining reflections of the moon.

The Prix Pictet Storm sequence is now on show on the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, till 19 October 2025.

The exhibition may also be proven on the following areas:

Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai – 17 October to 13 December 2025

TOP Museum, Tokyo – 12 December 2025 to 25 January 2026

Luma Westbau, Zurich – 6 March to five April 2026