About
The Prix Pictet
Launched in 2008 by the Geneva-based private bank Pictet & Cie, the Prix Pictet has rapidly established itself as the world’s leading prize in photography and sustainability. It has a unique mandate – to use the power of photography to communicate vital messages to a global audience. The goal is to uncover art of the highest order, applied to confront the pressing social and environmental challenges of the new millennium.
The prize currently plays to a global audience of over 400 million. The exhibitions of photographs shortlisted for the first two cycles of the Prix Pictet have toured the world, so far they have been shown in Paris, Thessaloniki, Dubai, Hong Kong, Eindhoven, Dresden, Bonn, London, Berlin, Lausanne Geneva, Dublin and Moscow, and further exhibitions are planned for Milan, Madrid and Delhi.
As Kofi Annan, the Prix Pictet’s Honorary President, wrote in his recent forward to Earth – the book of the second Prix Pictet, ‘together, these photographs by the artists shortlisted for the Prix Pictet highlight the beauty of the earth we share. But they also expose the damage, deliberately or carelessly, we are inflicting on our own environment. So these images are a celebration and a reminder of the urgent need to change our ways.’
The Prix Pictet has two elements: the prize of CHF 100,000 awarded to the photographer who, in the opinion of the independent jury, has produced a series of work that speaks most powerfully to the theme of the award; and the Commission, awarded by the Partners of Pictet & Cie, in which a shortlisted photographer is invited to undertake a field trip to a region where the Bank is supporting a sustainability project.
The theme of the first Prix Pictet was Water, and the second Prix Pictet was Earth. The third cycle of the award will focus on the theme of Growth. At once a blessing and a curse, Growth, in all its forms, presents one of the great conundrums facing humanity in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
