In the thick of winter 2021, photographer Siân Davey’s 33-year-old son proposed a family project. “Why don’t we fill our back garden with wildflowers and bees, and the people we meet over the garden wall, we’ll invite them in to be photographed by you,” he said. Davey and her four children were galvanised by the task and set about clearing the small, neglected garden of their cottage on the Dartington Estate in Devon. The resulting photographs show passers-by, friends and family — including Davey’s daughter Alice, pictured here — as they react to the profusion of flora. What we see, says Davey, is “the chemistry between humans and nature”.

That alchemy is at the heart of this year’s Prix Pictet exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, where Davey is showing alongside 11 other photographers shortlisted for the sustainability-focused award. Each entry for the SFr100,000-prize was selected for its relevance to this year’s theme: “human”. “In a world facing unprecedented challenges, from social inequality to environmental crises, it was crucial to turn the lens towards humanity itself,” says Prix Pictet’s executive director, Isabelle von Ribbentrop.

Hoda Afshar, an Iranian photographer based in Australia, is also presenting work about an emotional and spiritual relationship with the Earth. Her project, titled Speak the Wind, which featured in this magazine in 2022, explores a belief held by people in the Strait of Hormuz, off the southern coast of Iran, that the wind can come to possess a person and cause them harm.

Other photographers were interested in the precarity of children’s futures. The UK’s Vanessa Winship and New Delhi-based Gauri Gill focused on the challenges and joys experienced by schoolgirls in rural villages — in the harsh, dry landscape around the borderlands of Eastern Anatolia (for Winship) and Rajasthan (for Gill), where droughts and monsoons can change the fate of a year. They featured in the magazine in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Polish photographer Michał Łuczak and Lima-based Italian photojournalist Alessandro Cinque each chronicled the impact of mining on the people in their communities.

Here, we look at four nominated photographers offering new perspectives on the human.

Siân Davey
Devon, UK

The Garden

Among the native wildflowers that Davey and her family planted in their garden — meadowsweet, wild carrot, sunflowers, poppies and cornflowers, as well as structures for clambering gourds and sweet peas — the photographer also placed chairs and chaises longues for her subjects to rest on.

Davey spent 15 years working as a psychotherapist before turning to photography, and says the garden, replete with couches, explores a similar principle: “how a space can enable someone to inhabit their true self”. Some stripped off their clothes and lay against the cool of the grass, others wandered through the flowers. “People bring in their ancestry, they bring their hopes,” says Davey, who’s still welcoming new subjects, “their lack of purpose, their longing for purpose, their grief and their profound joy”.

Michał Łuczak
Upper Silesia, Poland

Extraction

Łuczak was raised in a region of southern Poland where coal has been mined for the past 200 years. “When you are born in this landscape, it’s quite normal,” he says of his relationship to the industry. But his perspective changed when earthquakes — caused by the ground adjusting to the hollow, mined-out spaces — became more regular.

“It was so frequent that I was annoyed with it,” he says with a laugh. He began to photograph other “consequences” of mining: the small lakes and rotting trees created by eroded ground, the patterns of coal dust on the skin of the miners, the crooked slant of a sinking house. The project has also become a way for Łuczak to think about his conflicted feelings around coal, “or black gold, as we call it here”. “We have to find a way to disconnect from this kind of extracting, but to remain with our tradition,” he says.

Gera Artemova
Kyiv and Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine

War Diary

Artemova began her visual diary on the morning of February 24 2022, when she was awoken by the sound of explosions in her Kyiv apartment. Russia had begun its invasion of Ukraine. The next day she moved with her family to a tiny house in a village in Cherkasy Oblast, 130km from Kyiv. She continued photographing daily life throughout the evacuation and their return to the city.

War Diary, the resulting body of work, is sequenced in diptychs: the hand of a fresco in Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv beside the hand of her son as he plays with a leaf in the village; the steam from a simmering pot next to the smoke from a bombed-out building in Kyiv. “You are cooking, and you see the beautiful light from the window and spring outside, but you can’t forget about the war and why you are there,” says Artemova. “The diptych shows both sides of this reality”.

Vasantha Yogananthan
New Orleans, US

Mystery Street

Off the back of a grant to shoot anywhere in the US, French-Sri Lankan photographer Yogananthan decided to explore the reality of life in New Orleans almost two decades on from Hurricane Katrina. He focused his lens on the generation born in the years following the 2005 storm, spending three summer months observing a group of boys as they became teenagers. In the resulting series, titled Mystery Street, we only see children.

“It seems like the city was abandoned by others,” Yogananthan says. “I liked the idea that the children would be on their own in an urban environment that was shaped, constructed, partly destroyed by past generations.” In this photograph, taken one evening in the park as the boys played football in “the blue hour, sunset hour”, the subject is watchful, looking protectively at something outside the group. Yogananthan says, “I was feeling that in this moment there was a sense of community, and there was a sense of hope.”

Prix Pictet Human, 2023 is at the V&A’s Porter Gallery until October 22

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