Prix Pictet

Peter Aspden interviews the winner of the Prix Pictet 2008

With disarming lack of pretension, Benoit Aquin freely admits that thoughts of environmental destruction were a long way from his mind when he first visited China in 2002. “I wanted to go to Mongolia – to see how far I could get away from home. I had no specific project in mind. I was there to do some travelling rather than take any pictures.

But then a friend started to describe the dust storms that afflicted the country every spring” and Aquin’s imagination was fired. Four years later he revisited the country to see the evidence for himself, and took care to pack his camera. He was profoundly moved by the experience, and produced a series of stunning photographs that won the inaugural Prix Pictet last year.

Aquin’s The Chinese ‘Dust Bowl´ series illustrates many of the consequences of any environmental disaster: refugees gaze distractedly into the middle distance, wondering if they will ever find a permanent home again; luckless peasants tread their way carefully on the land, avoiding the huge cracks in the ground that signify another failed harvest.

But it is Aquin’s extraordinary palette of colours, the limp ochres and lifeless greys of a landscape drained of hydration, that tell the real story. About 400,000 square kilometres of cropland and prairies have turned to desert as a result of unsustainable practices: the barren soil is swept up by the wind which turns it into dust storms that make their way all over the world.

“It was a strong subject,” says Montreal-based Aquin with understatement. “I was expecting to see some remarkable things – but I got even more than I expected. Things just seemed to happen for me. I saw three or four storms – the following year there was just one. A line of trucks just suddenly appeared during one storm. It was a gift.” He admits what all photographers know: luck has a part to play in the alchemy of his art.

Aquin’s work has focused on environmental issues from the beginning of his career, covering subjects such as the appalling effects of pesticide on banana-crop workers in Central America, and the quick-melting ice floes of the Canadian Great North.

“I am always challenged by complex subjects, and how to make them palpable,” he says bullishly. “If you find a strong subject, the challenge is to make it interesting of course, but also a little bit magical too. I like reality when it becomes surreal and fantastical.”

He says he enjoys working with journalists: “It leaves you room to be more free with your images. The journalist can anchor the subject so you don’t have to tell everything in the image. It is liberating.”

I ask how he balances the demands of truth and artistry, and he pauses to reflect. “I think it has always been a challenge to balance the demands of a career and more spiritual concerns. I don’t know if I will ever succeed in that.”

It is a tension that has made itself felt in Aquin’s current project which addresses the world’s food crisis. “It picks up some deep concept of our essence,” he says. “It is a really profound problem that we have to answer, and I don’t think things are radical enough for where we are now. Of course it gets very political.”

The contrasting imperatives of journalism and art are something that can be used to his advantage, he says. “You can show things in a magazine that are designed to have an immediate impact. With placing works in a gallery, you can achieve something different, much more oneiric. It works on a different level.”

Another recurrent theme in his work is that of hunting: “It is a less journalistic subject, but it goes back a long way. The very first pieces of art, paintings on cave walls, were about hunting. The first ecologists were hunters. It is very interesting: when I show some of the images to urban people, they really have a hard time with them, but when I show them in the country they are really interested to know where the pictures have been taken. It shows how you can be disconnected from where we came from.”

In a way, he says, the subject matches the intimacy of his most obviously personal work, the series of portraits he made of sex workers in Montreal, using a Polaroid camera and the subjects’ own words. “It was a project to break the barrier between normal and marginal walks of life.” It was also one of his most difficult assignments. “It was very tough – trying to find the people in the first place, and then getting them to agree to be in the project.”

It was one of his artful pieces of work, I say to him. “I am not competing with photojournalists,” he replies spiritedly. “I want to do something different.”

Benoit Aquin won the inaugural Prix Pictet in 2008. His book ‘Chine’ will be published in October 2009. Peter Aspden is the Financial Times’ Arts Writer. He was a member of the Prix Pictet jury in 2008