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Vision
Food riots. Loss of forest cover. Desertification. The ecosystems we depend on appear to face resource demands already beyond their capacity. As governments try urgently to stimulate growth, a central question remains. Can the earth’s complex living systems sustain the future consumption patterns of another three billion people in the world’s population by 2050?
Or are we making the transition, as the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen has suggested, to a point where the face of the earth – its soil, its waters, its groves, its hollows – is no longer natural, but bears the terminal scars of man’s intervention.
Impurity, excess, contamination, absence, control: these were the aspects of sustainability on the theme of Water covered by photographers nominated for last year’s Prix Pictet. This year the theme is Earth.
Sponsored by the Geneva private bank Pictet & Cie, the Prix Pictet is the world’s first prize dedicated to photography and sustainability. It has a unique mandate – to use the power of photography to communicate crucial messages to a global audience; and it has a unique goal – art of the highest order, applied to the immense social and environmental threats of the new millennium.
As Kofi Annan, the Prix Pictet’s Honorary President, said, in awarding the 2008 Prix Pictet to the Canadian photographer Benoit Aquin, “It is my hope that the Prix Pictet will help to deepen understanding of the changes taking place in our world and raise public awareness about the urgency of taking preventative action. The images submitted for the Prix Pictet confront us with the scale of the threat we face and they act to inspire governments, businesses – and all of us as individuals – to step up to the challenge and support change for a sustainable world.”
Entry to the Prix Pictet is by nominations. More than seventy nominators from five continents have already begun the search for the series of images that will, in the opinion of the independent jury, have the power and artistic quality demanded by the Prix Pictet.
The shortlist for this year’s Prix Pictet will be announced at the Rencontres des Arles festival in July and the winner of this year’s CHF100,000 Prix Pictet will be announced in Paris in October. One of the shortlisted photographers will be invited to complete a commission to record a sustainability project supported by Pictet & Cie and linked to the theme of this year’s award.
