The Prix Pictet is an international award to photographers for their work in raising consciousness of important environmental and social issues. “Collage” is the title of the book bringing together some of the women photographers who have been nominated or shortlisted for the award since it began in 2008.
Sean Sheehan
The book opens with a tribute to Graciela Iturbide by way of a conversation with her by Michael Benson, the Director of Prix Pictet. This is followed by an essay by Sally Mann, a recipient of the award in 2021, reflecting on her work in the “pain-haunted, cruelty-haunted, and death-haunted” South of the United States.
The title of Alixandra Fazzina’s photobook “A million shillings – Escape from Somalia”, comes from the fare (around £50) paid by refugees fleeing from Somalia and Ethiopia and hoping to cross the Gulf of Aden to safety via Yemen. Now, ten years later, refugees are fleeing for their lives from Yemen: “A parable for our times, untangling powerful metanarratives that cloak the links between human suffering and protracted conflict”.
Polly Braden, a documentary photographer based in London, portrayed the impact of government austerity measures on single parents in England in her project Holding the Baby. Her project was a participatory one, with some of the photographs taken by the parents themselves.
They capture, she says, “families’ sense of adventure, optimism, creativity and ambition, transcending their difficulties”.
The Civil War has a political valency in contemporary politics in the US: celebrating the Confederates, honouring those who supported slavery, being a less-than-subtle way of not dissociating oneself from expressions of white supremacy. Others claim that the Confederacy is a symbol of southern pride, not racism.
There is a visual dimension to this difference of opinion and it comes to the fore in controversies about statues of Confederate individuals (think of the toppling of the statue of a slave trader, Edward Colston, in Bristol in the UK in 2020).
During the American Civil War, there was a siege of a Confederate city called Corinth by Union forces and it featured in a 2016 movie, “The free State of Jones”. An-My-Lê’s photograph from a film set for the movie raises questions about the unsettled nature of how the Civil War is remembered in the US. A film set from a historical movie is an act of imagination, it configures the past in a particular way, and bigoted Americans can look back at the Civil War through their own ideological lens.
Memory often has an imaginative aspect, we remember the past in ways that suit our present dispositions and in ways that may shroud issues of race, class and wealth.
Attention is drawn here to only three of the photographs in “Collage”; there are some sixty more in the book and they are mostly, often in very different ways, striking and memorable images.
They portray exclusion and experiences of a shared past in an unfolding and uncertain future.
“Collage: Women of the Prix Pictet since 2008” is published by Gestalten.
(Photos supplied by the publisher)
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