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The Serpentine Sackler Gallery, designed by Zaha Hadid. Photo by John Offenbach.

An installation image from the opening exhibition by Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas. Photo by John Offenbach.

Photo by John Offenbach.

Photo by John Offenbach.

Photo by John Offenbach.

Pritzker Prize–winning architect Zaha Hadid meets the press. Photo by John Offenbach.

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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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So we’re especially looking forward to the reaction to this year’s pavilion, an amorphous construction made of reflective aluminum and dreamed up by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, Japanese architects who design under the name SANAA. “The pavilion is floating aluminium, drifting freely between the trees like smoke,” explained the architects in a statement. “The reflective canopy undulates across the site, expanding the park and sky. Its appearance changes according to the weather, allowing it to melt into the surroundings. It works as a field of activity with no walls, allowing views to extend uninterrupted across the park and encouraging access from all sides. It is a sheltered extension of the park where people can read, relax, and enjoy lovely summer days.”

Having a hard time picturing it? Not to worry. John Offenbach will be photographing the pavilion, capturing the empirical and metaphorical efforts of the talented young architectural duo. This is the fifth year Offenbach has documented the pavilion project. The first time, in 2005, was under the auspices of The New York Times, which hired him to shoot the structure created by Portuguese architects Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura with Cecil Balmond of design and engineering firm Arup. (That unusual pavilion was aptly described by the architects as a “vision of a crouching animal, hunched, ready to pounce on the gallery building.”) The next year, the Serpentine asked Offenbach back, and he’s been their pavilion documentarian ever since, photographing the work of such acclaimed architects as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Rem Koolhaas.

“I look forward immensely each year to photographing the Serpentine Gallery pavilion,” says Offenbach. “I am unashamedly an architectural groupie. The pavilion is an opportunity for everyone involved to feel good.  For the architects, it’s a stage to do something slightly different. For Londoners as well as visitors, it’s a beguiling and  spectacular structure, a meeting place to enjoy and make use of, in the beautiful surroundings of Hyde Park in the center of London.”

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009 will be on view July 12 through October 18. For more information, please visit the gallery’s website: http://www.serpentinegallery.org/