Prix Pictet: Storm

The power of photography

Storm is increasingly the default setting for our lives. It is as if the next environmental, medical, social or political calamity is mere moments away. Of course, Storm is the dramatic expression of nature’s wild side, yet it is also the defining characteristic of our age. We are constantly reminded that the precious ecosystems of our fragile planet are under threat as never before. At the same time our social and political systems are fracturing – in the famously prophetic words of W.B. Yeats ‘the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. Against all of this there are ripples of discontent that could still turn into a storm powerful enough to provoke the kinds of change necessary to save us all.