Photographers Ragnar Axelsson and Michał Łuczak, shortlisted for the Prix Pictet, speak about process, curiosity and an evolving medium
The world’s leading award for photography and sustainability, Prix Pictet, returns to Luxembourg to showcase the works of 12 shortlisted photographers and the award-wining Gauri Gill who explore the plight of indigenous peoples, conflict, childhood, migration, and the traces humans leave behind.
The 10th edition of the Prix Pictet exhibition is hosted at Cercle Cité’s Ratskeller. It shows works from more than a dozen photographers, including Gill, who won the 100,000 Swiss Francs-award last year. The display continues until 19 January 2025 and is free to the public.
The Luxembourg Times spoke to Ragnar Axelsson and Michal Łuczak, two photographers featured in this year’s shortlist about their processes, the changing nature of photography as a medium, and the role of competitions like Prix Pictet.
‘It’s easy to be in the sunshine taking pictures’
Speaking via Zoom from his living room in Reykjavík, Iceland, Axelsson is in a race against time. “In Greenland, small villages have been abandoned, so you can see what’s happening. And I wanted to document that,” he said about his photo-journalistic work.
Axelsson (also known as RAX), is one of Iceland’s most renowned photographers - and particularly sensitive to the changing climate of Arctic countries. Since he stopped working for the country’s biggest newspaper, Morgunblaðið, in 2020, he’s revisited his previous work in light of escalating environmental changes.
“It’s like a retrospective of all the kinds of things I’ve done so far,” the photographer said. “When I started photographing, I wanted to do something. Every photographer, like an artist or painter, wants to do something that’s remembered. I went to Africa because every photographer in the world was in Africa.” But Axelsson found himself drawn to more familiar territory.
“I decided to go in another direction - to the cold,” he said. “I tried to photograph the conditions, the weather, as bad as it would get. So when the weather is bad, I’m outside taking pictures, showing how life there really is. “
His series, exhibited at Prix Pictet’s exhibition in Ratskeller and titled Where the World is Melting, documents the changing lives and conditions of native peoples in the Arctic.
“In one village, Cape Hope [Greenland], I took quite a symbolic photograph - and that photograph is in the Prix Pictet exhibition. There were thirty-eight people in that village when I came there first some 35 years ago.” But when Axelsson revisited the village over thirty years later, he found it all but deserted. “There was a last man standing in the village - Jens Emil.”
RAX captured Jens Emil as he was saying something in Greenlandic. “I asked Hjelmer: ‘What did he say?’ And he said ‘There is no hope in Cape Hope anymore.’ He was leaving the village for the last time. The wind and the storms had taken over, the houses were going down.”
Axelsson, in his work and ethos, seeks out difficult circumstances in order to convey stories that might otherwise go undocumented.
“I’m very passionate about what I’m doing. You have to be. When I’m there it’s like being in a coma or something, just thinking about nothing that distracts you when you’re there,” he said. “That’s the reason I have to be out in really cold conditions and storms: because those are the best photographs. It’s easy to be in the sunshine taking pictures.”
Whether you’re an established photographer or in search of exposure, Axelsson finds that institutions like Prix Pictet help further photography as a medium and art form.
“What Pictet did is an extraordinarily good thing for photography - and I think the art world should do more to open people’s eyes. There’s a lot of different approaches to a lot of different things in Pictet exhibitions.”
Everybody on that shortlist is a winners in some way, the photographer said. “The exhibition opens doors and windows and eyes to people and people think about it. I’ve had a lot of calls and emails regarding it - so I know it’s working!”
‘We should be curious about ourselves’
While most of the works shown have human subjects - clad in traditional dress, caught in conflicts, or shining and bright - Michał Łuczak quite consciously took an alternate approach, the photographer said on the sidelines of a preview event of the exhibition for the press.
“I decided even before knowing this edition of Prix Pictet that I will not photograph people for the series because I wanted to show the consequences of coal mining, the consequences of human actions in our landscape and the whole idea of extracting goods and profit from it.”
‘We should be curious about ourselves’
While most of the works shown have human subjects - clad in traditional dress, caught in conflicts, or shining and bright - Michał Łuczak quite consciously took an alternate approach, the photographer said on the sidelines of a preview event of the exhibition for the press.
“I decided even before knowing this edition of Prix Pictet that I will not photograph people for the series because I wanted to show the consequences of coal mining, the consequences of human actions in our landscape and the whole idea of extracting goods and profit from it.”
Łuczak’s pieces, taken around the Upper Silesia region of southern Poland, exude a strikingly inhuman air, showing dilapidated buildings, tilted dwellings, and the remnants of great coal mines. This comes in stark contrast to many of the images on show at the exhibition, in which the primacy of the human form, moulded by modern contexts, is on full display in the elegant Cercle Cité.
These spaces, and these kinds of photographic competitions, are important to photography as an evolving medium, Łuczak said. “There’s this romantic side of being a photographer where you can work on your piece and try to exhibit it somewhere - which is very often frustrating because there is no such interest.
“There is a lot of photography in the world at the moment. So the [Prix Pictet] competition is a nice situation because you can meet people here, and it’s a very interesting group of people.”
Being a photographer in this evolving context is a challenge of its own. “Having been a photographer for over twenty years and being a curator and teacher, too, it’s very difficult to be moved by photography. I’m not happy about it, because I really love this medium and am kind of overwhelmed. When you have contact with it all the time, there’s no holidays from photography.”
That being said, Łuczak connected with many of the pieces on show at Prix Pictet’s exhibition. “I really appreciate the work of Ragnar because he’s done it for years and he’s a person who saw the change with his own eyes. He knows the people, too; it’s not like he went to this village once and never came back.”
Another series on display, Siân Davey’s The Garden, also resonated with Łuczak when he first saw it.
“I really like this work because it’s so, so simple, but it touches the really human side of being a human. The whole concept of putting this garden together from scratch and then inviting people to take these simple photographs… it really strikes me.”
Summarising his personal approach - and capturing a spirit that can be felt throughout the diverse works - Łuczak insists on a new (if familiar) kind of introspection.
“We should be curious about ourselves - not in this colonial way, as it was in photography for decades - and we should exchange and show our worlds and invite each other to participate in this type of exchange.”
