Prix Pictet presents inaugural exhibition at Paris Photo 2026

The Prix Pictet is the world’s leading award for photography and sustainability, founded in 2008. Every two years, a new theme relating to sustainability is announced, photographers are nominated whose work speaks to that theme, and from these artists a shortlist of 12 is selected. The shortlist announcement takes place at the Rencontres d’Arles, the annual photography festival in the South of France, followed by the announcement of the winner at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London. Previous themes include Water, Growth and Fire, while previous winners of the award include Joana Choumali, Gauri Gill and Richard Mosse. Collaborating with Paris Photo builds on Pictet’s long-term commitment to the arts and expands the platform Pictet already provides for photographers whose work confronts the challenges of our time. 

Alfredo Jaar, The End (GSL_a), 2025, from the series The End, 2025

For this inaugural exhibition at Paris Photo, two winning series are exhibited in dialogue: Valérie Belin’s Still Life, which won the Prix Pictet Disorder in 2015, and Alfredo Jaar’s The End, which won the most recent cycle, Storm, in 2025. Jaar’s series documents the Great Salt Lake in Utah, an important ecosystem for millions of migratory birds that is running dry due to excessive water extraction. The lake has lost more than 70% of its water so far, threatening the migratory path that these bird populations have relied on for thousands of years and leading to extreme population decline. Jaar’s photographs reveal dramatic changes to the landscape, capturing sparse pools of water in increasingly marshy surroundings, the earth tones offset by the snow-capped mountains in the background. 

Alfredo Jaar, The End (GSL_c), 2025, from the series The End, 2025

Jaar’s work subtly exposes the fragility of environmental ecosystems, while holding back from explicit scenes of dying wildlife. He focuses precisely on the landscape itself, meaning as viewers we are forced to engage with its transformations, an act encouraged by the small print size of the images. This is an intentional choice by Jaar, and it forms a striking contrast with the large-format images of fellow Prix Pictet-winner Valérie Belin.

Valérie Belin, Still life with mirror, 2014, from the series Still Life, 2014

Belin explores contemporary mass-consumerism, and particularly the ubiquity of plastic, through the pictorial tradition of still life and, within that, vanitas and memento mori. Her compositions are replete with plastic objects one might find in a discount shop anywhere in the world: figurines, flowers, beads, masks, slinkies and startlingly pale mannequin heads. Swamped, almost buried in decorations, the heads take on a symbolic function, demonstrating the asphyxiation of humanity among mass consumption. In the artist’s own words, the use value of these objects “is virtually nil… their only justification lies in the chaos resulting from the imperatives of international trade and the needs that are created to stimulate it.” Belin’s work has a compulsive, confrontational quality, transforming everyday items into a metaphor for socio-environmental collapse. Elsewhere at the fair, photographs by previous winners and nominees including Thomas Ruff, Joana Choumali and Luc Delahaye are exhibited across various international galleries. 

Alongside the exhibition, Belin and Jaar will join curator Brandei Estes on Saturday 14 November at 2pm for a special talk at the Grand Palais: The Cost of Beauty. Taking their award-winning series as a starting point, the artists will reflect on how the photographic medium and the idea of beauty can be harnessed to address urgent environmental issues.

Booking link here (Paris Photo ticket required for entry). 

By Sofia Carreira Wham