As much as we may want to live well-organised and quiet existences, too often we feel surrounded by disruption, on a personal and global level. We may be responsible for the chaos directly surrounding us, but numerous unpredictable factors such as dangerous meteorological phenomena, sudden accidents and other assorted events, end up having different impacts on our society. That's why the main theme of the sixth cycle of the Prix Pictet competition – "Disorder", a topic that somehow follows the lines of the previous edition dedicated to "Consumption" – terribly fits with the times we're living in.
Founded by the Pictet Group in 2008, the competition has quickly established itself as the leading award in photography and sustainability, helping to discover new photographers producing powerful images on social and environmental topics. The final prize, with a value of 100,000 Swiss Francs (USD100,000) is set to allow a photographer to spend at least a year focusing on personal projects.
The Disorder Finalists' exhibition is currently on at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (until 13th December 2015). Honorary President of Prix Pictet Kofi Annan announced on the opening of the event this year's winner, Valérie Belin.
If you like photography and would like to know more about this year's competition, but can't visit the event in Paris, check out the Disorder – Prix Pictect 06 volume recently published by teNeues.
The book features all the finalists' (12 artists from 7 countries shortlisted by an independent jury) portfolios, together with outstanding individual images by photographers from the wider nomination.
Photography fans will find in the volume Belin's "Still life" (2014) series – chaotic jumbles of kitsch and cheap objects and everyday items, mannequin heads, plastic tubes, fake flowers, and random elements, forming disorderly yet elegantly striking compositions in bright colours.
In an official press release Belin stated about her series, "These still lifes offer a jarring commentary on the effects of our obsession with cheap objects, for not only is their material, plastic, emblematic of the wasteful use of raw materials, but it also represents a grotesque kind of immortality because of its non-biodegradable nature – an immortality that, one could say, is slowly killing the planet."
The 12 photographers included – Ilit Azoulay (Israel), Valérie Belin (France), Matthew Brandt (USA), Maxim Dondyuk (Ukraine), Alixandra Fazzina (UK), Ori Gersht (Israel), John Gossage (USA), Pieter Hugo (South Africa), Gideon Mendel (South Africa), Sophie Ristelhueber (France), Brent Stirton (South Africa) and Yang Yongliang (China) – cover several subjects via various genres, including portraits and landscape photography.
The portfolios touch upon a wide variety of themes, such as the devastation caused by climate changes; popular uprisings in Ukraine; human trafficking and refugee crises; conservation rangers working with locals to evacuate the bodies of four Mountain gorillas killed in Congo's Virunga National Park; the disappearance of honey bees and artificial cities and the consequences of flooding in different parts of the globe.
Disturbing and eye-opening, colourful and breathtaking, all the pictures tell a story, suggesting readers to contemplate disorder through a journalistic approach or from a creative point of view.
"Our times are defined by Disorder", states Kofi Annan in the Foreword, "at the very moment in human history when we almost dared imagine that no problem was beyond our capacity to solve. Remarkable advances in medicine have helped to eradicate scores of formerly fatal diseases. We are capable of breathtaking feats of engineering – raising mighty dams, flood defences and soaring earthquake-proof buildings. Our mastery over manifold aspects of life has deluded us into thinking that we have bent the planet to our will. Yet the fragility of that assumption is exposed with each new pandemic, earthquake, tsunami or drought. With each passing day our illusion of order is shattered."
While the Disorder volume is just out, after Paris, the exhibition of the shortlisted images will tour the world, beginning at MAXXI in Rome and then travelling to major international museums and galleries including the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, Geneva; Westbau, Zurich; CAB (Contemporary Art Brussels), the Palau Robert, Barcelona and the Museum of Photographic Art, San Diego. Check out the Prix Pictect site for further dates and information.
Dirsorder – Prix Pictect 06 is out now on teNeues.
Image credits for this post:
All images © 2015 courtesy of The Prix Pictet Ltd
Intoxication of Oblivion, 2012, Photo © Ilit Azoulay, cover for "Disorder – Prix Pictet 06", published by teNeues.
Still life with mask #140209, 2014, Photo © Valérie Belin
Somali refugees departing Shimbiro Beach to board smugglers' boats to Yemen. Only 11 of the people who took this boat ever reached Yemen alive. April – December 2008, Shimbiro, Somalia, Photo © Alixandra Fazzina
Christa and Salomon Raymond Fils, September 2008, Decade Village, Haiti, Photo © Gideon Mendel
Time After Time: Blow Up No. 2, 2007, Photo © Ori Gersht
Untitled, Agbogbloshie Market, 2009-10, Accra, Ghana, Photo © Pieter Hugo
Bees of Bees (detail), 2009, Photo © Matthew Brandt
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