Prix Pictet talks programme at Paris Photo
Wednesday, 11 November, 3:30pm
Bearing witness: Laeticia Vançon on Photographing Ukraine
Laetitia Vançon is in conversation with Wiktoria Michalkievicz about Odesa, her long-term portrait of a city she first visited one hundred days after Russia’s full-scale invasion and has returned to regularly since. Together, they will explore the images we expect to see of a city at war, and what photography can reveal about the life that continues within it. Attending to the ordinary, Vançon’s photographs invite us to consider what endures—and how images meet the different stories we bring to them. They will also discuss the book’s layered design, conceived to echo the photographer’s process of looking through these layers and invite readers to follow a similar path. The conversation will be followed by a signing of herself-published book Odesa.
Saturday 14 November at 2pm
The Cost of Beauty
Valérie Belin and Alfredo Jaar join curator Brandei Estes to explore how beauty can confront uncomfortable truths. Taking their Prix Pictet winning series as a starting point, they discuss photography’s power to address consumption, environmental loss and human impact, and ask whether seductive images can make us look more closely at the world around us.
Vançon worked as a chemical engineer in France and South Africa until 2009. From 2010 to 2012, she stepped away from a defined career path, settled in Germany, and started using photography as a form of healing to process personal traumas. This evolved into long-term documentary work.
She completed her studies at the Danish Photojournalism School, Aarhus, in 2014.
Since 2015, Vançon has been a regular contributor to The New York Times. Alongside her reporting, she developed At the End of the Day (2016–18), which documents the lives of young people in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland.
Vançon’s work in Odesa, Ukraine, won the Feature Photography prize from the Overseas Press Club of America in 2023. Her work has also been recognised by the Sony World Photography Awards (2019); Pictures of the Year International, United States (2020); Lucie Foundation, Los Angeles (2023); the Leica Oscar Barnack Award, Wetzlar, Germany (2023); Siena International Photo Awards, Italy (2023); and Life Framer, London (2024).
Her work has been shown at international venues including the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015), and PHI Center, Montreal, Quebec (2014). Her work has appeared in several group exhibitions including A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014); Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (2013); Nathalie Obadia Gallery, Brussels (2014); and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York (2013). Among the collections that have acquired her work are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, Seoul.
Jaar has received numerous awards including the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in Sweden in 2020. In 2024, he was awarded the IV Mediterranean Albert Camus Prize in Spain, followed by the Edward MacDowell Medal in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 2025.
His work can be found in dozens of public and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museu de Arte de São Paulo; Tate, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; M+, Hong Kong; and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000, both in the United States.