The Prix Pictet has announced that the theme for its twelfth cycle will be Jungle, with the news delivered by the award’s director Michael Benson during the opening week of Les Rencontres d’Arles on 9 July 2026. The award has run since 2008 and is now among the most prominent photography prizes focused on environmental and social sustainability, structures each cycle around a single word, chosen for its capacity to carry multiple meanings and to prompt a wide range of photographic responses.
The Arles announcement was followed by a presentation from Chilean artist, architect and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar (Top Photo), who was named the winner of the eleventh cycle, Storm, at the V&A in September 2025. His winning work, The End, addresses the condition of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, a keystone ecosystem in the western hemisphere that scientists have described as an environmental nuclear bomb in slow motion. The lake has lost 73 per cent of its water and 60 per cent of its surface area since the mid-nineteenth century, the result of excessive water extraction. Toxic dust now blows from the exposed lakebed, salinity has reached dangerous levels, and without a significant increase in water flow, the lake faces the prospect of disappearing entirely, with severe consequences for public health, the environment and Utah’s economy. Jaar appeared alone on stage in Arles to discuss the work and the research behind it.
Previous themes have included Water, Disorder, Space, Fire and Storm. Jungle continues that tradition of selecting a term that operates simultaneously as a concrete ecological reality and an open interpretive field.
Benson framed the choice in terms of both urgency and complexity. The world’s jungle ecosystems, he noted, are the planet’s major carbon sinks, playing a critical role in climate regulation while facing sustained threats from deforestation, fire and degradation. Rivers running through these systems are increasingly polluted and disconnected, and surface water coverage has been shrinking. But the theme extends beyond the ecological. “Nothing in a jungle exists alone,” Benson added. “They are complex interconnected systems that we only vaguely understand. The Jungle is a place of mystery and secrets. It is a place of legendary lost cities and civilisations, economic adventures, and many broken dreams.
In this way, the Jungle mirrors contemporary human environments. Cities, digital networks and social ecosystems have their own undergrowth: layers of complexity that obscure as much as they reveal.”
Alfredo Jaar The End
The Prix Pictet’s network of more than 350 nominators worldwide will now begin identifying photographic portfolios that engage with the theme. An independent jury will review the nominated work, and a shortlist of twelve photographers will be announced in summer 2027. The twelfth laureate will be named at the opening of an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in September 2027. That exhibition will subsequently travel to more than a dozen international venues.
The prize has also welcomed a new chair of its independent jury. Sir Tim Smit, the Dutch-born British businessman who jointly created the Lost Gardens of Heligan and the Eden Project in Cornwall, takes over from Sir David King, who stepped down after nine cycles. The full composition of the jury will be announced later this summer.
Alfredo Jaar THE END SLC0, 2025
Separately, the Prix Pictet will have a dedicated presence at Paris Photo this year, following the announcement that the Pictet Group has become the fair’s official partner. The award will occupy a space on the Promenoir, a prominent central position within the Grand Palais Nef, presenting a curated selection of work by past laureates that traces the full span of the prize since its inception and returns to themes that, as the organisers note, have only become more pressing with time.
The Prix Pictet was founded by the Geneva-based Pictet Group in 2008 and is recognised today as the world’s leading prize for photography and sustainability. It is independently governed, managed and administered by an independent secretariat and jury, with an advisory board.
For each cycle, the award focuses on a different theme that promotes discussion and debate on sustainability issues. A network of over 350 nominators, including critics, curators, and other photography specialists, invites artists from around the world to submit their work. The independent jury creates a shortlist of twelve photographers based on artistic and photographic merit, originality in conception and/or execution, relevance to the current cycle’s theme, ability to address a pressing sustainability challenge, and the series’s being a unified, coherent body of work. The jury then selects the winner from the shortlist, and a prize of 100,000 Swiss Francs is awarded for a body of work that speaks most powerfully to the theme. (Read more about the prize and process here.) The Prix Pictet touring exhibitions have reached over 1.5 million visitors worldwide.
The eleven previous Prix Pictet laureates are Alfredo Jaar (Storm), Gauri Gill (Human), Sally Mann (Fire), Joana Choumali (Hope), Richard Mosse (Space), Valérie Belin (Disorder), Michael Schmidt (Consumption), Luc Delahaye (Power), Mitch Epstein (Growth), Nadav Kander (Earth) and Benoit Aquin (Water).
Alfredo Jaar THE END SLC0, 2025
Alfredo Jaar
Jaar participated in the Venice Biennale (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013, and 2026) and the Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (1987, 1989, 2010, and 2021), as well as Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1987 and 2002). Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Musee cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2007); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst, all in Berlin (2012); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2013); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom (2017); Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2020); SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo (2021); and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (2023). Jaar has received numerous awards, including the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in Sweden in 2020. In 2024, he was awarded the IV Mediterranean Albert Camus Prize in Spain, and this year has won the Edward MacDowell Medal in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
The touring exhibition of Storm continues, with forthcoming stops at Fotografiska Shenzhen, the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, and RMIT Gallery in Melbourne.