Prix Pictet International Shortlist 2010 announced full details

INTERNATIONAL SHORTLIST ANNOUNCED
The shortlist for the Third Prix Pictet, the world’s leading prize in photography and sustainability, has just been announced. The theme for this year’s edition is Growth.

It’s great to see that both Taryn Simon, see earlier post, and for that matter, Vera Lutter, who makes large-scale pinhole cameras and who I mentioned in a report on photo-london for Hotshoe back in 2004, are in the running.

The shortlisted artists are:
Christian Als (Denmark)
Edward Burtynsky (Canada)
Stéphane Couturier (France)
Mitch Epstein (US)
Chris Jordan (US)
Yeondoo Jung (Korea)
Vera Lutter (Germany)
Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso)
Taryn Simon (US)
Thomas Struth (Germany)
Guy Tillim (South Africa)
Michael Wolf (Germany)

The winner will be announced by HE Kofi Annan at the award ceremony in Paris on Thursday 17 March 2011.

The shortlist was chosen by an independent jury from submissions by over 450 photographers from five continents, put forward by the Prix Pictet worldwide network of nominators.

The eight-member jury consists of a panel of international experts including Shahidul Alam, photographer, writer, curator and activist; Peter Aspden, the Financial Times arts writer; Michael Fried, art historian and critic; Loa Haagen Pictet, curator of Pictet & Cie’s art collection; Nadav Kander, the 2009 winner of the Prix Pictet; Christine Loh, chief executive of Civic Exchange, Hong Kong, and a leading environmental campaigner; and Fumio Nanjo, director of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

“The jury looked for photographic series of the highest artistic merit that also presented a convincing narrative about the critical issues of sustainability and in particular, the theme of Growth. Growth, which lifts countless millions out of poverty, also has a huge and potentially unsustainable environmental cost. It presents one of the great conundrums facing humanity in the early decades of the twenty-first century.”

For the bios of the 12 shortlisted, see over.

International photo competition winners round up

© Edmund Clark wins The British Journal of Photography International Photography Award 2009 with Guantanamo: If the light goes out.

BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY IPA AWARD
Edmund Clark has won The British Journal of Photography International Photography Award for his new project, Guantanamo: If the light goes out. Some of the work can be seen online at lens culture. One of the judges, Nick Galvin from Magnum Photos, said of the Guantanamo series: “Intellectually stimulating work.”

Clark’s previous project Killing Time was shot over two years, and captures life inside a wing for elderly prisoners. Follow this link online at Society Guardian, to see some of the work.

PRIX PICTET 2009
Winner of the £60,000 Prix Pictet photography prize for environmental sustainability is British based photographer Nadav Kander who was nominated for his series of photos Yangtze, The Long River Series, 2006-07 “documenting the rapidly changing landscape and communities of China’s Yangtze River, from its mouth to source”. Kander also scooped the $10,000 Lucie Awards IPA Prize in the International Photographer of the Year category with Elliott Wilcox as the Discovery of the Year and Rachel Papo as the Deeper Perspective Photographer of the Year (sponsored by Blurb). See earlier Hot Blog post on Wilcox.

To embargo or not to embargo?
I received the announcement of the winner last week but the press release was embargoed until 21:00. This raises the question of press embargoes and whether they are acknowledged. On a quick web search Katie Clifford found this post from aphotoeditor which was published before the embargo time. This begs the question as to whether, in a digital world where individuals can self  publish in real time, embargoes have any meaning. What happens when an embargo is not respected? If someone wants to “break” news, is it now a case of fastest fingers first? Later, aphotoeditor posted a reply to an email from a disgruntled press dept upset about him “breaking their news embargo”. “I think it’s insane that you would email blast bloggers the winner of a prize you haven’t handed out yet. PR at its worst,” he posted. Any views on this welcomed?

Prix Pictet Shortlist 2009: The Great Divide – where are all the women photographers?

There are a distinct lack of women photographers in the upper echelons of the industry and it seems that now is the time to start doing something about it. This is not a rally call for positive discrimination measures to be put in place to deal with structural inequalities, or for women to be given extra special consideration, but a call to take stock and look at where, and how far, we may have come.

Now’s the time to start to examine the contemporary landscape and reflect on what has, and is, happening. For example, I received the Prix Pictet Shortlist 2009 invitation for the preview of the shortlisted work and book launch. And surprise, surprise? Not one woman photographer has made it to the shortlist. Does this matter? Not if it is a one off, but sadly, I think this is a trend that persists, even as we approach 2010.