The US artist Sally Mann has gained the 2021 Prix Pictet prize, the worldwide award in images and sustainability.
The announcement was made on Wednesday in a ceremony at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London for the opening of an exhibition of the 12 shortlisted artists.
The theme of the ninth Prix Pictet was fire. Mann, whose operate explores family members, social realities and the passage of time, gets a income prize of 100,000 Swiss francs (£82,000).
Her winning collection, Blackwater (2008-2012), explores the devastating wildfires that enveloped the Excellent Dismal Swamp in south-eastern Virginia, the place the initially slave ships docked in The united states.
She attracts a parallel concerning the wildfires there and racial conflict in America, outlining:the US. “The fires in the Good Dismal Swamp appeared to epitomise the great fire of racial strife in The usa – the civil war, emancipation, the civil rights movement, in which my spouse and children was involved, the racial unrest of the late 1960s and most lately the summer of 2020. Anything about the deeply flawed American character appears to embrace the apocalyptic as resolution,” she claims.
Born in Lexington, Virginia, Mann started researching images in 1960. She is a Guggenheim fellow, a few-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and was named “America’s greatest photographer” by Time journal in 2001.
Her the latest survey exhibition, A Thousand Crossings, explored the identity of the American south and her possess romantic relationship with her position of origin.
Sir David King, chair of the Prix Pictet jury, reported: “If ever there was a time for the Prix Pictet to acquire up the concept of fireplace, that time is now. This past summer season we have been inundated with illustrations or photos of hearth at its most frighteningly damaging. Of class, hearth is a most capricious aspect, and its several faces ended up current in the team of shortlisted series.”
The Prix Pictet was founded by the Pictet Group in 2008 and is recognised as the world’s primary prize for images. A new concept about each and every 18 months aims to endorse dialogue and debate on essential problems of sustainability.
Shortlisted photographers this calendar year provided Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige for their undertaking Wonder Beirut, based mostly on a series of postcards from the 1960s and 70s which are even now on sale in Lebanese bookshops today, and Rinko Kawauchi, who photographed fireworks each summertime for 4 a long time for her collection Hanabi.
The 8 former winners are Benoit Aquin (drinking water), Nadav Kander (Earth), Mitch Epstein (advancement), Luc Delahaye (electrical power), Michael Schmidt (consumption), Valérie Belin (disorder), Richard Mosse (area) and Joana Choumali (hope).
The V&A’s totally free exhibition of the shortlisted photographers ends on 9 January 2022.
