{"id":168682,"date":"2025-09-25T16:13:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T16:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/168682\/"},"modified":"2025-09-25T16:13:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T16:13:08","slug":"prix-pictet-2025-photography-prize-captures-a-world-battered-by-storms-art-and-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/168682\/","title":{"rendered":"Prix Pictet 2025 \u2013 photography prize captures a world battered by storms | Art and design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Magnificent, monstrous clouds choke the sky. Even the sun is suffocated by the volatile energy of supercell thunderstorms, harbingers of chaos capable of discharging hailstones the size of grapefruits and expanding to 80km wide and 20,000 metres high. Photographer Camille Seaman<\/a> became a storm chaser in 2008 and spent several years capturing these titanic tempests on camera. \u201cYond same black cloud, yond huge one, looks like a foul bombard that would shed his liquor,\u201d Trinculo warned in The Tempest. Seaman\u2019s spectacular images are certainly Shakespearean in their sublime magnitude, an awesome warning that kicks off the Prix Pictet\u2019s 2025 show.<\/p>\n

Seaman\u2019s series, The Big Cloud, interprets the theme \u2013 storm \u2013 literally, but others among the 12 shortlisted artists take it in different directions, from nuclear bombsites to copulating plankton. Several projects focus on American stories, shifting attention to the decisive role global powers play in the current geopolitical crisis and the disastrous consequences for landscapes and people.<\/p>\n

Alfredo Jaar<\/a>\u2019s elegy to the dying Great Salt Lake in Utah takes you on a poetic journey to the vanishing environment, its destruction accelerated by excessive water extraction, polluting the surrounding air, destroying habitats and wreaking havoc on the local economy. Hannah Modigh\u2019s Hurricane Season<\/a> is an attempt to trace the psychological impact of the threat of annual hurricanes on communities in southern Louisiana, finding parallels between the weather conditions and the state\u2019s long history of poverty, violence and racism.<\/p>\n

Poetic journey \u2026 Alfredo Jaar\u2019s The End. Photograph: Alfredo Jarr<\/p>\n

With the tension of a slasher film, Modigh\u2019s sultry scenes follow dislocated figures in porches, trailers \u2013 makeshift shelters for a temporary existence, lived subject to nature\u2019s whims. Three shirtless, tattooed men, oblivious to the camera, plot around a table in a squalid cabin late at night. A Ku Klux Klan figure is painted on the wall. In another image, a woman sits on a porch piled with rubbish and surrounded by a swarm of cats, as she stares back at us with a dead-eyed, threatening look. Is this the calm before the storm? Human hate is as terrifying and unpredictable as nature\u2019s wrath.<\/p>\n

The cause and effect of the US\u2019s macho culture is also woven into the work of Balazs Gardi<\/a>, who found himself on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, in the eye of a storm that would shake long-held principles of American democracy. Captioned by the minute in which they were taken, these pictures have a harried, breathless pace, as Gardi navigated teargas, flag-waving Maga insurrectionists and armoured riot police, the blunt sounds of clashing helmets and batons mirrored in metal bars that barricade the photographs on the wall. Gardi deftly uses black-and-white to signal that macho culture and fear-mongering by demagogic politicians can unleash uncontrollable forces anytime, anywhere.<\/p>\n

An undulating structure, cascading like a wave through the centre of the room, holds Roberto Huarcaya<\/a>\u2019s 30-metre work. Huarcaya had been setting up a roll of photosensitive paper under a fallen palm tree in the rainforest when a storm broke. His work was struck by lightning. The piece bears traces of what Huarcaya planned to capture, angrily slashed and torn by nature\u2019s savagery into an enigmatic work of abstraction that rivals a Dansaekhwa<\/a> painting. Huarcaya leaves us to contemplate what else might be possible if we let go of our hubristic attachment to human creativity and let nature intervene.<\/p>\n

Grandiose \u2026 Tom Fecht\u2019s Lucifer\u2019s Vortex. Photograph: Tom Fecht\/Courtesy Tom Fecht and Laffanour<\/p>\n

Tom Fecht<\/a>\u2019s grandiose, painterly pictures propose a similar relinquishing to nature\u2019s majesty. The enormous scale of Fecht\u2019s prints utterly transforms the work from something that could look AI-generated to dynamic vortexes with rippling densities of colour, an exercise in why photographs need to be shown in high-quality exhibitions like this. Fecht \u2013 a former engineer who has taught scientific imaging \u2013 photographed the rare phenomenon of cold-water plankton bioluminescence in the Atlantic Ocean. Using a special rig, Fecht took pictures 30 metres above the swirling stormy sea, battling high winds to capture these plankton, endangered by the ocean\u2019s rising temperatures \u2013 as they glow while reproducing under a full moon, emitting an electrical discharge, almost invisible to the naked eye.<\/p>\n

Finally, Belal Khaled\u2019s Hands Tell Stories<\/a> were photographed in Gaza where the storm of war prevails. After the Palestinian photographer\u2019s home was destroyed, he lived in a tent outside Nasser hospital. For 185 days he took pictures of hands \u2013 hands desperately reaching for food and water, bandages where hands should be, the lifeless hands of the deceased. Destinies in our hands. No words may be found for these pictures, only actions.<\/p>\n

Prix Prictet: Storm opens at V&A South Kensington, London, 26 September<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Magnificent, monstrous clouds choke the sky. Even the sun is suffocated by the volatile energy of supercell thunderstorms,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-168682","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}