Magnificent, monstrous clouds choke the sky. Even the sun is suffocated by the volatile energy of supercell thunderstorms, harbingers of chaos capable of discharging hailstones the size of grapefruits and expanding to 80km wide and 20,000 metres high. Photographer Camille Seaman became a storm chaser in 2008 and spent several years capturing these titanic tempests on camera. “Yond same black cloud, yond huge one, looks like a foul bombard that would shed his liquor,” Trinculo warned in The Tempest. Seaman’s spectacular images are certainly Shakespearean in their sublime magnitude, an awesome warning that kicks off the Prix Pictet’s 2025 show.
Seaman’s series, The Big Cloud, interprets the theme – storm – literally, but others among the 12 shortlisted artists take it in different directions, from nuclear bombsites to copulating plankton. Several projects focus on American stories, shifting attention to the decisive role global powers play in the current geopolitical crisis and the disastrous consequences for landscapes and people.
Alfredo Jaar’s elegy to the dying Great Salt Lake in Utah takes you on a poetic journey to the vanishing environment, its destruction accelerated by excessive water extraction, polluting the surrounding air, destroying habitats and wreaking havoc on the local economy. Hannah Modigh’s Hurricane Season is an attempt to trace the psychological impact of the threat of annual hurricanes on communities in southern Louisiana, finding parallels between the weather conditions and the state’s long history of poverty, violence and racism.
With the tension of a slasher film, Modigh’s sultry scenes follow dislocated figures in porches, trailers – makeshift shelters for a temporary existence, lived subject to nature’s whims. Three shirtless, tattooed men, oblivious to the camera, plot around a table in a squalid cabin late at night. A Ku Klux Klan figure is painted on the wall. In another image, a woman sits on a porch piled with rubbish and surrounded by a swarm of cats, as she stares back at us with a dead-eyed, threatening look. Is this the calm before the storm? Human hate is as terrifying and unpredictable as nature’s wrath.
The cause and effect of the US’s macho culture is also woven into the work of Balazs Gardi, who found himself on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, in the eye of a storm that would shake long-held principles of American democracy. Captioned by the minute in which they were taken, these pictures have a harried, breathless pace, as Gardi navigated teargas, flag-waving Maga insurrectionists and armoured riot police, the blunt sounds of clashing helmets and batons mirrored in metal bars that barricade the photographs on the wall. Gardi deftly uses black-and-white to signal that macho culture and fear-mongering by demagogic politicians can unleash uncontrollable forces anytime, anywhere.
An undulating structure, cascading like a wave through the centre of the room, holds Roberto Huarcaya’s 30-metre work. Huarcaya had been setting up a roll of photosensitive paper under a fallen palm tree in the rainforest when a storm broke. His work was struck by lightning. The piece bears traces of what Huarcaya planned to capture, angrily slashed and torn by nature’s savagery into an enigmatic work of abstraction that rivals a Dansaekhwa painting. Huarcaya leaves us to contemplate what else might be possible if we let go of our hubristic attachment to human creativity and let nature intervene.
Tom Fecht’s grandiose, painterly pictures propose a similar relinquishing to nature’s majesty. The enormous scale of Fecht’s prints utterly transforms the work from something that could look AI-generated to dynamic vortexes with rippling densities of colour, an exercise in why photographs need to be shown in high-quality exhibitions like this. Fecht – a former engineer who has taught scientific imaging – photographed the rare phenomenon of cold-water plankton bioluminescence in the Atlantic Ocean. Using a special rig, Fecht took pictures 30 metres above the swirling stormy sea, battling high winds to capture these plankton, endangered by the ocean’s rising temperatures – as they glow while reproducing under a full moon, emitting an electrical discharge, almost invisible to the naked eye.
Finally, Belal Khaled’s Hands Tell Stories were photographed in Gaza where the storm of war prevails. After the Palestinian photographer’s home was destroyed, he lived in a tent outside Nasser hospital. For 185 days he took pictures of hands – hands desperately reaching for food and water, bandages where hands should be, the lifeless hands of the deceased. Destinies in our hands. No words may be found for these pictures, only actions.