Prix Pictet | New theme announcement

For 16 years the Prix Pictet has harnessed the power of photography to draw global attention to issues of sustainability. It is now the world’s leading photography prize, with sustainability as its subject. The Prix Pictet makes many of its most significant announcements during the opening week of Les Rencontres d’Arles.

This year, on Thursday 4 July, ahead of a special presentation at the Théâtre Antique of the work of Gauri Gill, the tenth Prix Pictet laureate, Prix Pictet Executive Director Isabelle von Ribbentrop announced that the theme for the eleventh cycle is ‘ Storm’.

Commenting on the new theme she said:

‘ Storm’ is increasingly the default setting for our lives. We seem to be perpetually balanced on the edge of some momentous event. It is as if the next environmental, medical, social or political calamity is mere moments away.

Of course, ‘ Storm’ is the dramatic expression of nature’s wild side, yet it is also the defining characteristic of our age. We are constantly reminded that the precious ecosystems of our fragile planet are under threat as never before. At the same time our social and political systems are fracturing – in the famously prophetic words of WB Yeats, ‘ The centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. Against all this there are ripples of discontent that could still turn into a storm powerful enough to provoke the kinds of change necessary to save us all.

Over the coming months the Prix Pictet’s global network of over 300 nominators will identify portfolios of work that align with the eleventh theme. These portfolios will be reviewed by the award’s independent jury led by Sir David King. The shortlist will be announced at Les Rencontres d’Arles in July 2025.

The eleventh laureate will be announced in September 2025 at the opening of the award exhibition in London.