Prix Pictet

Prix Pictet Storm is the latest exhibition from the world’s leading award for photography and sustainability, presenting its eleventh cycle in a comprehensive exhibition featuring 12 leading shortlisted photographers at Fotografiska Shenzhen from 1 October to 29 November 2026.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

PRIX PICTET, THE WORLD’S LEADING AWARD FOR PHOTOGRAPHY AND SUSTAINABILITY TO ANCHOR FOTOGRAFISKA SHENZHEN’S OPENING WITH STORM

Prix Pictet Storm is the latest exhibition from the world’s leading award for photography and sustainability. Prix Pictet was founded in 2008 by the Pictet Group to harness the power of photography to draw attention to issues of global sustainability.

Following an international tour with stops in Beijing, London, Dubai, Tokyo and Zurich, the exhibition will serve as one of the landmark presentations for the launch of Fotografiska Shenzhen. The world-renowned photography museum is opening its Shenzhen outpost in partnership with Shenzhen Bay MIXC. Located in Shenzhen Bay, the new museum is scheduled to open to the public on October 1, 2026.

Storm will showcase the work of twelve photographers shortlisted for the eleventh cycle of the award. Both a natural phenomenon and a metaphor for the unseen and relentless forces shaping our world today, the theme speaks to the growing volatility of our age, encompassing environmental collapse, economic instability and social unrest, where we seem forever poised on the brink of the next crisis.

The theme challenges photographers to capture the raw energy and profound consequences of these turbulent times. Whether focusing on the devastation of climate disasters, displacement or the simmering tensions within divided societies, Storm reveals not only disruption but also the generative force within, the possibility of transformation, renewal and hope that emerges in its wake.

The shortlisted photographers are:
Takashi Arai
Marina Caneve
Tom Fecht
Balazs Gardi
Roberto Huarcaya
Alfredo Jaar
Belal Khaled
Hannah Modigh
Baudouin Mouanda
Camille Seaman
Laetitia Vançon
Patrizia Zelano

ABOUT THE SHORTLISTED PHOTOGRAPHERS & WORKS

Takashi Arai methodically circles monuments and sites related to the nuclear history of Japan, USA, and the Marshall Islands capturing hundreds of 6×6cm daguerreotypes to produce a series of what he calls micromonuments. Marina Caneve’s Are They Rocks or Clouds? attempts to foresee a future catastrophe, a repeat of the floods and landslides that devastated the Dolomites in northern Italy in 1966. Tom Fecht documents Luciferines, cold- water plankton endangered by rising ocean temperatures whose bioluminescence occurs when millions of them are exposed to oxygen on the turbulent surface of the sea. Balazs Gardi’s The Storm chronicles the post- election attack on the US Capitol Building on 6 January 2021. Roberto Huarcaya captures an Amazonian palm lying on the bed of the Madre de Dios River on a 30m roll of photosensitive paper exposed by four flashes of lightning. Alfredo Jaar’s The End documents the Great Salt Lake, Utah, which is being destroyed by excessive water extraction and become what scientists have described as an ‘environmental nuclear bomb’. Belal Khaled’s Hands Tell Stories began while living in a tent outside the morgue at Nasser Hospital, Gaza after his house was destroyed, and documents hands that through their scars, their stillness, their grip on life, tell stories no voice could carry.

Hannah Modigh’s Hurricane Season charts the lives of those in southern Louisiana, capturing an atmosphere of living on the verge of eruption and a sense that uncertainty, fear and anger bubble beneath the deceptively calm surface. Created in a flooded basement, Baudouin Mouanda’s series recreates the 2020 COVID-lockdown floods in Brazzaville, Congo with those who experienced them. Camille Seaman’s series documents a type of thunderstorm called a supercell that can produce grapefruit-sized hail, spectacular tornadoes and clouds up to 80km wide and 20km high that block out the daylight and create an ominous space beneath. Laetitia Vançon’s series is a personal tribute to the resilience and quiet defiance she encountered in Odesa, Ukraine, a city of both strategic and symbolic importance. For her series, 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.

ABOUT THE PRIX PICTET

Prix Pictet was founded by the Geneva-based Pictet Group in 2008 and is recognised today as the world’s leading prize for photography and sustainability. It is independently governed, managed and administered by an independent secretariat and an independent jury, with an advisory board.

For each cycle, the award focuses on a different theme that promotes discussion and debate on issues of sustainability. A network of over 350 nominators, including critics, curators, and other specialists in photography, invites artists from around the world to submit their work. The independent jury creates a shortlist of twelve photographers based on artistic and photographic merit, originality in conception and/or execution, relevance to the current cycle’s theme, ability to address a pressing sustainability challenge, and ensuring their series is a unified and coherent body of work. The jury then selects the winner from the shortlist, and a prize of 100,000 Swiss Francs is awarded for a body of work that speaks most powerfully to the theme. The touring exhibitions of Prix Pictet have reached over 1.5 million visitors worldwide.

The winner of Storm was announced on Thursday 25 September 2025, at the opening of an exhibition featuring the twelve shortlisted photographers at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In July 2026, the Prix Pictet announced Jungle as the theme for its twelfth cycle during the opening week of Les Recontres d’Arles.