2025 Winners

This series shows how a people, a landscape and an extreme climate form a living equilibrium. The gestures, postures and clothing reflect living traditions that honour the cold. What stands out is a sense of respect and attentiveness: the series conveys the endurance, adaptation and sensitivity of this population, portrayed in their truth and with quiet dignity.

We appreciated the mastery of volumes, textures and light.

The chromatic palette plays a crucial role in this unity. The cold whites and greys, punctuated by touches of colour from traditional clothing, create an atmosphere that is both realistic and slightly dreamlike. The soft, enveloping light reveals the subtle variations of snow and ice, giving the whole ensemble a pictorial quality that lends each scene an almost narrative depth.

This series transforms a snow-covered urban landscape into an almost abstract space, where reality seems to drift between appearance and disappearance. The approach stands out immediately through its relationship to emptiness: snow becomes a true compositional tool, echoing the Japanese concept of Ma (間), the art of the interval, of the meaningful void that structures and supports the image.

We appreciated the mastery of minimalism and the spirit of woodblock printing or reserve drawing, where snow becomes a plastic medium rather than a simple meteorological phenomenon.

The very soft treatment of light, the pastel palette and the gradual fading of details give the scenes a dreamlike quality. The city seems to shift to another plane of existence, as if it belonged to a memory or a dream, offering a subtle reflection on the boundary between the real and the imaginary.

A series that defines the very notion of a series

Each image in the series echoes the others through its economy of form, chromatic softness and the intelligence of its framing, which remains effective even when viewed upside down (inversion is a common test used to assess the strength of a composition).

The jury appreciated this image for the way it turns a ski descent into a form of calligraphy drawn across a vast sheet of snow. The track becomes a ductus: a continuous, intentional stroke where the skier's movement defines a visual grammar as precise as ink on paper, both spontaneous and deeply composed: the controlled curve of the trail, its rhythm, its inflections and counter-inflections.

The almost total loss of spatial reference amplifies this effect: the terrain dissolves into a monochrome field, and the skier appears suspended in an abstract space, as if writing directly onto the landscape.

The delicate variations in tone, from cold blue to soft grey, reinforce the graphic purity of the image.

The result is both striking and contemplative: a synthesis of athletic precision and artistic minimalism, where the mountain becomes a page and the skier an author of ephemeral signs.

This photograph brings together 2 qualities that are rarely present at the same time: a scene of exceptional naturalistic rarity and a composition of remarkable mastery.

Photographing a polar bear mother walking in single file with her young is already an extraordinary stroke of luck. Capturing them in such a composition borders on a naturalist miracle:

• a perfect single-file alignment
• identical spacing between the bears
• identical positioning of the paws and the inclination of the head
• a decreasing order of size
• the 3 bears forming a frieze, almost a repeating motif in which each body echoes the curve of the previous one
• a play of verticals (fur) and horizontals (ripples of the water)
• a composition structured in horizontal bands (water, ice, bears, sky)
• the 3 states of water (liquid water, ice, snow)
• the contrast and balance between the warm tones of the bears and the cold tones of the ice and water
• the glacial turquoise in the water, a rare luminous accent, a true Arctic signature that adds atmospheric depth and gives the eye a sensory anchor
• the juxtaposition of porous, smooth, rough and moving textures

The image immediately captures attention through the power of its incongruity. Snow erases the context, removes all points of reference and transforms a simple playground or decorative element into a graphic and almost symbolic apparition, prompting questions before telling a story.

The composition is rigorous:

• a subject centered within the white space
• a reduced palette in which the dragon’s colors become structure
• the discreet presence of 2 figures, which reintroduces scale

The entire series is built on a strong aesthetic principle: using snow as a tool of erasure that isolates subjects in order to reveal their involuntary poetry. What the jury appreciated:

• a complete visual coherence: snow-white palette, centered, floating compositions
• a logic of inventory, where each object becomes a motif suspended in the void
• a subtle sociological reading: traces of everyday life confronted with an extreme environment

This photograph was distinguished for its dual documentary and artistic dimension.

The geotextile covers reflect sunlight and protect the snow and ice beneath from heat and UV radiation. They allow the glacier to retain more mass from one year to the next.

These covers generate motionless “waves” that might just as well be snow-covered mountains made of the very snow that is disappearing and that they are meant to preserve. This formal ambiguity creates a striking effect: it becomes unclear whether we are looking at a glacier, a fabric drape, a frozen sea or a monumental installation.

The composition combines 3 strong elements:

• repeating undulations that create a powerful graphic rhythm
• the tension between dark areas and cold reflections
• the scale of the landscape, where the horizontal becomes almost vertical

The entire series succeeds because it develops a consistent visual grammar built on recurring draped motifs, a restrained palette and a constant ambiguous scale.

The strength of this image lies in its restraint.

Its composition is disorienting: the viewer loses any clear sense of up or down and instead enters a space shaped by depth and forward momentum, drawn toward the sky that appears between 2 enigmatic layers.

The photograph sets up a dialogue between the ethereal textures in the centre, the soft, finely striated surface below, and the hard, almost mineral layer of ice above.

The photographer works with gentle transitions between light and dark greys, creating a subtle yet clearly readable sense of relief, appreciated for its technical precision.

Within the series, this photograph becomes a key link in an exploration of forms, textures, the movement of wind over snow, and the relationship between surface and depth.

This image is simple in appearance but marked by great visual, emotional and technical precision, in which gesture, snow and space respond to one another in a minimalist, almost Japanese aesthetic.

The image relies almost entirely on emptiness: an erased horizon, a structureless snowy sky, and a body of water reduced to pure texture. Snowflakes fill the scene and become texture themselves, unifying sky and water, erasing spatial markers and creating an almost abstract atmosphere. The fisherman becomes the only point of anchoring, which gives the scene a strong internal tension.

The trajectory of the fishing line has the quality of a calligraphic gesture, forming something like a pared-down Japanese kanji in a cursive style. One senses the energy and breath of calligraphy. There is a palpable sensory atmosphere: cold, silence, snow, isolation, the fisherman’s concentration.

The use of color shows rare elegance, with an almost monochrome blue-grey palette.

It looks like an illustration by the famous Samivel, don’t you think? These plays of blue and white, this sense of peace and suspended time… The photograph approaches the look of an ink wash, a print, or a very light pastel.

The composition prioritizes shapes, rhythms, and tonal softness, which lies at the heart of the pictorialist aesthetic. The snow erases details, simplifies forms, and creates very gentle transitions between shadow and light. This absence of texture reinforces the impression of a painting or chalk drawing.

The relief is present, but only through subtle variations in density. This approach removes the documentary aspect to create a more atmospheric visual impression.

The composition is orchestrated like a painting, with a fluid ridgeline leading the viewer’s eye toward the summit and then toward the group of alpinists. The human silhouettes act as graphic accents that give scale, rhythm, and a discreet, elegant, timeless narrative.

This image combines minimalism, contrast work, raking light and geometric patterns. Its simplicity aligns with the tradition of classical black-and-white.

In black and white, the strength of an image often relies on its graphic structure. Here, the bars and their shadows form a system of parallel lines that creates a very strong visual rhythm.

The reading unfolds in clear layers: the eye enters through the long diagonal shadows, moves through the vertical fence, reaches the snow, and finally lands on a very unexpected pool ladder from which we reach the sky. Its discreet, isolated presence in the distance introduces a break in the strict geometry of the foreground. It adds minimal narrative and a point of breathing space, preventing the image from becoming a purely formal “abstract grid.”

The deep blacks of the bars and the pure whites of the snow generate maximum contrast, yet without losing detail in the snow : a negative space that allows the image to breathe. This space exists as a place textured by imagination, where the viewer projects themselves and leaves a trace.