About
Power
The theme of the fourth cycle of the Prix Pictet is Power. As a theme, Power has great creative reach. It has the potential to uncover images and issues that are both awe-inspiring and disturbing.
We have acquired enormous powers. We harness vast forces to power our cities, to fuel our cars and ensure that we can fly quickly to even the most remote parts of the globe. We comfortably assert control. Until we don’t. Until a typhoon slams through New York State, ripping off roofs, collapsing power lines and playing havoc with the fabric of innumerable lives. Until a volcano erupts in Iceland and, billowing great clouds of dust and ash into the atmosphere, makes a mockery of our reliance on the ability air travel to shrink the world. Hubristically we build homes where, perhaps, we should not and then are shocked when cliffs crumble into the sea and when precariously constructed villages in Bangladesh are swept away by floods. We harness economic power until it appears that we have less control than we had supposed.
Yet power is a paradox. The very same forces that engender despair can also be a source of hope. Huge advances in technology to generate renewable energy mean that the powers of the wind, the sea and the sun can now be converted into sustainable forms of energy.
Between now and January 2012 a network of 180 experts from five continents, acting as nominators for the prize, will scan the globe in search of images relating to the theme of Power. The challenge is to uncover images that are both of the highest artistic merit and have the narrative power to provoke and disturb, but also to inspire.
