Prix Pictet 2025 shortlist for the theme ‘storm'

The Guardian

20-07-2025

For her series, Acqua Alta a Venezia (High Water in Venice), Patrizia Zelano photographed encyclopedias, scientific treatises, and literary texts she saved from the waters during one of Venice's highest-ever recorded tides in 2019. The series is a four-step journey through the history of art. The first three photos take the viewer from antiquity to the Middle Ages, where books become relics. The second section features a book with water-like accordion pages. The volumes in the third section have become waves and stormy seascapes Photograph: Patrizia Zelano/Zamagni Arte, Rimini
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. Initially interested in the US state because of its violent history, Modigh wanted to investigate if this moves through generations. She came to realise that fear of hurricanes and the widespread undertone of aggression came from the same source, they were natural reactions to feelings of threat Photograph: Hannah Modigh
In his series Alfredo Jaar documents the Great Salt Lake, Utah, which is being destroyed by excessive water extraction and has become what scientists have described as an 'environmental nuclear bomb'. A keystone ecosystem for the western hemisphere, sustaining rainfall and providing a habitat for 10 million migratory birds, it has lost 73% of its water since the mid-19th century, exposing toxic dust and driving salinity dangerously high. Without a dramatic increase in water flow, the lake risks disappearing, devastating Utah's public health, economy and environment Photograph: Alfredo Jarr
Laetitia Vançon's series Tribute to Odesa is a personal tribute to the resilience and quiet defiance she encountered in Odesa, Ukraine, a city of strategic and symbolic importance. The war was present in the sea, in the air and in every story Vançon encountered. Turning her lens towards this space of tension, the simplest gestures – swimming, performing arts, returning to school or church, volunteering – took on a quietly heroic dimension. Her work became a portrait of the city through its people, who stayed in the face of the storm Photograph: Laetitia Vançon
Belal Khaled's Hands Tell Stories series began while living in a tent outside the morgue at Nasser hospital in Gaza after his house was destroyed. The tent overlooked an area where bodies were being gathered after the morgue reached full capacity. Khaled began documenting hands. Through their scars, their stillness, their grip on life, the images tell stories no voice could carry – a collective narrative through individual details, making the hand a visual anchor for understanding reality. Each hand carries a meaning of survival, absence and the fragile persistence of life Photograph: Belal Khaled
Marina Caneve's Are They Rocks or Clouds? series attempts to foresee a future catastrophe, a repeat of the floods and landslides that devastated the Dolomites in northern Italy in 1966. Avoiding revisiting the traditional sublime and monumental imagery of the mountain, the variations within the series are a metaphor for the stratification of the rocks that show the structure of mountains, revealing their geological epochs and their fragility, where at various points their slopes have collapsed Photograph: Marina Caneve
Balazs Gardi's The Storm chronicles the post-election attack on the US Capitol. The aftermath of the 2020 presidential election had the feel of a gathering storm for Gardi. Navigating fumes and rubber bullets while chronicling the attack, he felt the storm had arrived and wondered how this would alter the US's founding principles. As a young photographer in his native Hungary, he witnessed how malicious propaganda helped to shape a recently liberated state. The Storm is a warning of how a privileged society can slide into an Orwellian dystopia Photograph: Balazs Gardi
In the series Luciferines - Entre Chien et Loup (Between Dog and Wolf), 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. Their sublime traces remain almost invisible to the naked eye and can only be captured entre chien et loup , a magical twilight moment when the first blue rays of daylight intersect with the remaining reflections of the moon Photograph: Tom Fecht/Laffanour I Galerie Downtown, Paris
At the Vegetable Seller's, a piece from Baudouin Mouanda's series Le Ciel de Saison (Seasonal Sky) which recreates the 2020 lockdown floods in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo, with those who experienced them. During the floods it was impossible to get into inundated streets. Mouanda instead gathered personal testimonies to reconstruct the desolation later. Residents brought their belongings and posed in a flooded basement to recreate the situations they faced Photograph: Baudouin Mouanda
Camille Seaman's series The Big Cloud documents a thunderstorm called a supercell that can cause hailstones the size of a grapefruit, spectacular tornadoes and clouds up to 80km wide and 20km high that block out the daylight. It is important to remember the pain and destruction these storms inflicted on local people. Seaman's images speak to the duality of all things — there is no creation without destruction, a cloud can be beautiful, terrible or both Photograph: Camille Seaman
The image is from Roberto Huarcaya's series Amazogramas . A storm discharges accumulated energy, not as mere destruction, but as a force seeking to restore balance. This image captures that essence: a 30 metre-long frame of an Amazonian palm lying on the bed of the Madre de Dios River. While Huarcaya and his team were exposing a 30-metre roll of photosensitive paper placed beneath the tree, a storm erupted. Four flashes of lightning imprinted their energy on to the scene and the paper. Nature had taken control Photograph: Roberto Huarcaya/Rolf Art, Buenos Aires
In cold-war Japan, Takashi Arai heard first hand accounts from visiting hibakushas , survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki at school. The iconic mushroom cloud was rarely witnessed on the ground but photographed from above by the very bombers that carried out the attack – shaping Japan's visual memory retrospectively, and often through external perspectives. Arai methodically circles monuments and sites related to the nuclear history of Japan, the US, and the Marshall Islands, capturing hundreds of 6x6 cm daguerreotypes to produce a series – called Exposed in a Hundred Suns – of what he names 'micromonuments'
Photograph: Takashi Arai