At an opening event for Les Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival in France yesterday, the shortlist for the Prix Pictet—the world’s first prize dedicated to photography and sustainability—was announced. Nadav Kander is one of 12 artists to be selected for this prestigious honor. Congratulations, Nadav!
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Nadav Kander, Bathers, Yibin, Sichuan, 2007, from "Yangtze, The Long River Series."
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Here’s the complete shortlist:
Darren Almond, UK
Christopher Anderson, Canada
Sammy Baloji, Congo
Edward Burtynsky, Canada
Andreas Gursky, Germany
Naoya Hatakeyama, Japan
Nadav Kander, UK
Ed Kashi, USA
Abbas Kowsari, Iran
Yao Lu, China
Edgar Martins, Portugal
Chris Steele-Perkins, UK
(Incidentally, Pritzker Prize–winning architect Zaha Hadid was one of the jurors for the shortlist. And Nan Goldin is the guest curator for the festival.)
Nadav and his fellow shortlisted artists will now prepare for an exhibition at Passage de Retz, Paris, where the winner of the Prix Pictet will be announced by Kofi Annan, the Prix Pictet’s honorary president, on October 22. A further award, in the form of a commission for one of the shortlisted photographers to visit a region where Prix Pictet sponsor Pictet & Cie, a private bank based in Geneva, are currently supporting a sustainability project, will be announced at the same time.
The photography industry has no shortage of prizes, of course, but the Prix Pictet is a standout. Whereas other photo awards are essentially complete when the winners’ names are announced, the Prix Pictet is only getting started when it names its nominees—the shortlist is the beginning of a fresh effort to raise awareness about sustainability.
What’s more, the Prix Pictet is a testament to the power of photography to inspire change, a capability that I think is sometimes forgotten because we are all overstuffed from the feast of imagery that we are treated to daily. Don’t take it from me, though. The Prix Pictet explains itself very nicely here: http://www.prixpictet.com/about/vision/
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