12 photographers vie for Prix Pictet 2025, lenses firmly focused on sustainability

For the Prix Pictet 2025, the 12 shortlisted photographers have been announced, each of them responding to this year’s theme, ‘Storm’.

The competition was founded by the Geneva-based Pictet Group in 2008, and focuses on photography and sustainability. For each competitive cycle, the award offers a different theme, to encourage discussion and debate on issues surrounding sustainability.

The Prix Pictet 2025 shortlist

The award is open to photographers from around the world, with entries whittled down to the 12-strong shortlist, chosen for the works’ artistic and photographic merit, originality in conception and execution, relevance to the current cycle’s theme, and ability to address a pressing sustainability challenge.

The winner of this year’s prize will receive 100,000 Swiss francs and will be announced on 25 September 2025, at the opening of an exhibition featuring the shortlisted photographers’ works at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

The shortlist comprises: Takashi Arai, Marina Caneve, Tom Fecht, Balazs Gardi, Roberto Huarcaya, Alfredo Jaar, Belal Khaled, Hannah Modigh, Baudouin Mouanda, Camille Seaman, Laetitia Vançon, and Patrizia Zelano.

The candidates present varied interpretations of the theme. Japanese artist Takashi Arai looks at the nuclear history of Japan, USA and Marshall islands, while Italian Marina Caneve foresees a future catastrophe, a repetition of the 1966 floods in the Dolomites. Endangered cold-water plankton is explored by German artist Tom Fecht, while Hungarian Balazs Gardi chronicles the post-election attack on the US Capitol Building on 6 January 2021.

Roberto Huarcaya from Peru captures an Amazonian palm lying on the bed of the Madre de Dios River. Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar looks at Utah’s Great Salt Lake being destroyed by excessive water extraction. Palestinian Belal Khaled documents living in a tent outside the morgue at Nasser Hospital in Gaza after his house was destroyed.

Louisiana hurricanes are the subject of Hannah Modigh’s photography, while Baudouin Mouanda’s series recreates the 2020 lockdown floods in Brazzaville, Congo, which she replicated in a flooded basement. Camille Seaman’s series documents a type of thunderstorm, called a supercell, that can produce grapefruit-sized hail, tornadoes, and clouds that block out the daylight.

Laetitia Vançon presents a personal tribute to Odesa, Ukraine, while Patrizia Zelano photographed encyclopaedias, scientific treatises, and literary texts she saved from the waters during one of Venice’s highest-ever recorded tides, in 2019.

‘In many ways our planet is a more dangerous place to live than ever before. The impacts of the climate catastrophe abound. Fires, floods, heat and drought are killing and injuring people and destroying both infrastructure and precious ecosystems,’ says Sir David King, chair of the Prix Pictet jury. ‘Already, parts of our planet are unliveable, and all the indications are that more will follow. The economic, social and political impacts of these changes are immense. There could not have been a more timely moment for the Prix Pictet to invite nominations on the theme of Storm.’

The winner will be announced on 25 September 2025, at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, prix.pictet.com