The US artist Sally Mann has won the 2021 Prix Pictet prize, the worldwide award in pictures and sustainability.
The announcement was created 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 concept of the ninth Prix Pictet was fireplace. Mann, whose operate explores household, social realities and the passage of time, receives a funds prize of 100,000 Swiss francs (£82,000).
Her profitable collection, Blackwater (2008-2012), explores the devastating wildfires that enveloped the Excellent Dismal Swamp in south-jap Virginia, where by the 1st slave ships docked in The usa.
She draws a parallel between the wildfires there and racial conflict in The us, outlining:the US. “The fires in the Great Dismal Swamp seemed to epitomise the great fireplace of racial strife in America – the civil war, emancipation, the civil rights movement, in which my family was associated, the racial unrest of the late 1960s and most just lately the summertime of 2020. A thing about the deeply flawed American character would seem to embrace the apocalyptic as resolution,” she claims.
Born in Lexington, Virginia, Mann began researching photography in 1960. She is a Guggenheim fellow, a few-time receiver of the Countrywide 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 id of the American south and her individual marriage with her spot of origin.
Sir David King, chair of the Prix Pictet jury, reported: “If ever there was a time for the Prix Pictet to take up the concept of fire, that time is now. This past summertime we were being inundated with illustrations or photos of fireplace at its most frighteningly damaging. Of program, fire is a most capricious aspect, and its a variety of faces ended up existing in the team of shortlisted series.”
The Prix Pictet was launched by the Pictet Group in 2008 and is recognised as the world’s foremost prize for pictures. A new topic about every single 18 months aims to advertise discussion and discussion on crucial issues of sustainability.
Shortlisted photographers this 12 months integrated Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige for their challenge Ponder Beirut, based mostly on a collection of postcards from the 1960s and 70s which are however on sale in Lebanese bookshops today, and Rinko Kawauchi, who photographed fireworks every single summer for 4 a long time for her sequence Hanabi.
The 8 former winners are Benoit Aquin (h2o), Nadav Kander (Earth), Mitch Epstein (development), Luc Delahaye (electric power), Michael Schmidt (use), Valérie Belin (dysfunction), Richard Mosse (room) and Joana Choumali (hope).
The V&A’s absolutely free exhibition of the shortlisted photographers finishes on 9 January 2022.