Launched in April 2008, the Prix Pictet is the world's first prize dedicated to photography and sustainability. Its mandate is to use the power of photography to communicate vital messages to a global audience. It is a unique goal - art of the highest order, applied to confront the social and environmental challenges faced by humanity in the early 21st century. As Gro Harlem Brundtland laid at the inauguration of the award, "Photographs tan moue us and shape us and that's the point here... As a permanent award the Prix will help to ensure that matters of sustainability remain at the furefront of global debate." Each year the Prix Pictet will address a distinct sustainability theme and in its first year that theme was water. Just over 200 photographers from 43 countries were nominated for the first Prix Pictet. After considerable debate, the jury elected to shortlist eighteen photographers for the award and in so doing inevitably excluded some powerful works from further consideration. This book brings some of those images together with work by each of the short-listed artists to tell a story that is as harrowing as it is beautiful. It is a tale that ricochets between hope and despair, a compelling chronicle of the impacts of water (or the kick of it on our daily lives. The threats are clear to our food supply, to our health, to fragile ecosystems, to the ground on which we live, and even our peace and security. The skill, imagination and mastery of form that each of the factored artists bring to their work is crystal clear, too. "The result", as Kofi Arman, the Prix Pictet's Honorary President, comments in his foreword is, "a series of powerful images, which seek to confront us with the scale of the threat we face, and to inspire governments, business, - and all of us as individual to stop up to the challenge and support change for a sustainable world."
