Viewing Prix Pictet 2025 – Storm at V&A

The Prix Pictet returns to the V&A this week – opening to the public tomorrow in its new location in the Pictet Gallery, in the V&A South Kensington’s Photography Centre. The theme for the 2025 edition – the eleventh cycle of the international prize for photography and sustainability – is ‘storm’, and as ever, the exhibition presents twelve shortlisted artists selected by a jury, with the winner announced tonight at a special ceremony. The prize comes with an award of 100,000 Swiss Francs.

The 2025 show includes varied interpretations of the ‘storm’ theme, from extreme weather conditions, accelerated by climate change, and their devastating impact, to looser explorations of political agitation and destruction – among them a tribute to the resilient community of Odesa, Ukraine, by photojournalist Laetitia Vançon, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and the beautiful, painstakingly crafted daguerreotypes of Takashi Arai, made at the sites of former nuclear disasters in Japan.

Other highlights include an installation from Marina Caneve’s poetic series Are They Rocks or Clouds? The result of the artist’s research into the possibility of a future natural disaster in the Dolomites, questioning the role photography might play in visualising and preparing for crisis, and Baudouin Mouanda’s staged, brightly coloured portraits of families and the possessions they were able to salvage when floods destroyed their homes in Brazzaville after severe storms in 2020 during lockdown.