The Prix Pictet 2025 photography exhibition opens with a stunning display of nature's raw power through Camille Seaman's storm-chasing images. Her series "The Big Cloud" captures magnificent yet terrifying supercell thunderstorms that can discharge hailstones the size of grapefruits and expand to 80 kilometers wide and 20,000 meters high. These spectacular images, Shakespearean in their sublime magnitude, serve as an awesome warning that introduces this year's exhibition theme of "storm."
While Seaman interprets the storm theme literally, the other 11 shortlisted artists take it in vastly different directions, ranging from nuclear bomb sites to copulating plankton. Several projects focus specifically on American stories, drawing attention to the decisive role global powers play in current geopolitical crises and their disastrous consequences for both landscapes and people.
Alfredo Jaar's work presents an elegy to Utah's dying Great Salt Lake, taking viewers on a poetic journey through a vanishing environment. The lake's destruction has been accelerated by excessive water extraction, which pollutes the surrounding air, destroys natural habitats, and wreaks havoc on the local economy. His piece "The End" captures the environmental devastation with artistic grace.
Hannah Modigh's "Hurricane Season" attempts to trace the psychological impact of annual hurricane threats on communities in southern Louisiana. Her work finds striking parallels between the weather conditions and the state's long history of poverty, violence, and racism. With the tension of a slasher film, Modigh's sultry scenes follow dislocated figures living in porches and trailers – makeshift shelters for temporary existence lived at the mercy of nature's whims.
Modigh's photographs reveal disturbing scenes that capture both natural and human storms. One image shows three shirtless, tattooed men plotting around a table in a squalid cabin late at night, oblivious to the camera, with a Ku Klux Klan figure painted on the wall. Another depicts a woman sitting on a porch piled with garbage and surrounded by a swarm of cats, staring back with a dead-eyed, threatening look. These images raise the question: is this the calm before the storm? They suggest that human hatred can be as terrifying and unpredictable as nature's wrath.
The cause and effect of America's macho culture is also woven into Balazs Gardi's work, who found himself at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in the eye of a storm that would shake long-held principles of American democracy. His photographs, captioned by the exact minute they were taken, have a harried, breathless pace as Gardi navigated tear gas, flag-waving MAGA insurrectionists, and armored riot police. The blunt sounds of clashing helmets and batons are mirrored in metal bars that barricade the photographs on the wall. Gardi skillfully uses black-and-white photography to signal that macho culture and fear-mongering by demagogic politicians can unleash uncontrollable forces anytime, anywhere.
Roberto Huarcaya's 30-meter work is displayed on an undulating structure that cascades like a wave through the center of the exhibition room. Huarcaya had been setting up a roll of photosensitive paper under a fallen palm tree in the rainforest when a storm broke, and his work was literally struck by lightning. The resulting piece bears traces of what Huarcaya originally planned to capture, but it has been angrily slashed and torn by nature's savagery into an enigmatic work of abstraction that rivals a traditional Korean Dansaekhwa painting. His work leaves viewers to contemplate what else might be possible if humans let go of their attachment to controlling creativity and allow nature to intervene.
Tom Fecht's grandiose, painterly pictures propose a similar surrender to nature's majesty. The enormous scale of Fecht's prints completely transforms the work from something that could appear AI-generated into dynamic vortexes with rippling densities of color. This transformation demonstrates why photographs need to be shown in high-quality exhibitions like this one. Fecht, a former engineer who has taught scientific imaging, photographed the rare phenomenon of cold-water plankton bioluminescence in the Atlantic Ocean. Using a special rig, he took pictures 30 meters above the swirling stormy sea, battling high winds to capture these plankton as they glow while reproducing under a full moon, emitting an electrical discharge almost invisible to the naked eye. These plankton are endangered by the ocean's rising temperatures, making Fecht's work both beautiful and urgent.
Finally, Belal Khaled's "Hands Tell Stories" were photographed in Gaza, where the storm of war continues to prevail. After the Palestinian photographer's home was destroyed, he lived in a tent outside Nasser Hospital for 185 days, during which he took pictures of hands – hands desperately reaching for food and water, bandages where hands should be, and the lifeless hands of the deceased. His work suggests that destinies remain in human hands, and that for these pictures, no words can be found, only actions.
The Prix Pictet: Storm exhibition opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum South Kensington in London on September 26, offering visitors a powerful exploration of how storms – both natural and human-made – continue to shape our world in profound and often devastating ways.
